OpenEuphoria

Hi there!

I am writing you a letter because I just saw that you successfully ported Euphoria to different POSIX variants. I know that it is remarkable but hard job, and I'm thankful that you managed it. IMHO, this is exactly the thing Euphoria needs to "survive" between explosions of modern, portable languages.

Open sourced, portable development system, easy to learn, fast and rock solid - this is idea that stands behind Euphoria, but also behind Linux. Now, there is one (or) more system(s) born from this project idea: Open source but hardware based. I'm talking about Pandora, but there are also Beagleboard, Wizz, GP32. What is in common is that they all got similar hardware driven by ARM processor, with Linux as a main OS. Those are independent gaming consoles, or just a open boards leaving you choice to build system on your own (e.g. laptops). I'm not familiar with all of them, so I'll write what I think it stands: Not all of them are Open source (I think), nor Linux based (not sure). However, they are highly hardware compatible (I think so), and they are driven by highly motivated community which creates (or makes ports of) different tools, games and applications (this is one I'm pretty sure of).

I'm not informed enough, so I'll concentrate at newest and most promising "breeze" at family, Pandora. It should be prototype of new standard: independent open source hardware, transportable universal hybrid between pocket console and full laptop: in fact, "role" (purpose) of this beauty depends of user wish. IMHO, hardware concept is great, but it could fail if it is not supported by adequate software. This is the point where Euphoria fits-in. Fast & Easy, this is exactly what Pandora needs: Euphoria, as a great, portable developing system. It could (and should) also promote Euphoria as a (more then) alive & capable development system.

I am asking you to provide us with informations about porting possibilities of Euphoria to ARM processor Linux based platform: Is it possible to port Linux x86 based interpreter (compiler) to ARM based, and how difficult could be it. What are possible problems, and what could be possible (dis)advantages of porting. I think that you are the person which has a right capabilities for project like this, and this could be a great thing for Euphoria & Pandora both. There are great hackers around at Pandora community: they already ported many X86 driven libraries and tools to Pandora. However, when Euphoria is in question, I think that you are unavoidable. Unfortunately, I'm not a programmer, and right now I'm just learning Euphoria. However, I've got many years of theoretic knowledge (I'm tracking Euphoria of its beginning). I'm glad to help and I'm ready to spare lot of free time to help (IMHO so important) project like this. Benefits for whole community are so valuable so that will be honor to me to be involved.

First shipment of Pandora should arrive at July. I will be proud owner of probably first one in my country (Croatia). Well, my son will be, to be fair :)

I hope that I didn't scare you with huge letter like this. I just wanted to show you that I really care about it. Also, I hope that you manage to understand my sentence construction: I'm not a native English speaker and I'm aware of that my pidgin English probably sounds weird. Anyway, I have to thanks you again for your effort at Euphoria, and I hope that you'll send me some answer, whatever it will be.

Almost forgot some links: This is topic I started about Euphoria, at one of official forums of Pandora. One more post, related to open portable dev-system, this is mostly sound related. Here is unofficial but regularly updated blog about (Open)Pandora. And here is BeagleBoard, interesting project.

Kind regards, Darko Bednjanec

...Pandora in regards to Euphoria...

Hi,
If the device is running Linux then I don't see any real problems with porting the interpreter or translator for it, except "does it have enough RAM?".
There are a few lines of x86 assembly code in the runtime library that deal with switching tasks/threads. But it's basically just some simple stack manipulations so they should be easy to translate to ARM assembly.
I already made a special version of the runtime library that would compile for devices with no OS at all, and used it to compile a Euphoria program for the Gameboy Advance (also ARM-based). The thread is here: http://openeuphoria.org/EUforum/index.cgi?module=forum&action=flat&id=101238

/Michael

Now, it is "just" to make Android Runtime (Dalvik VM) to work on (my favorite) Pandora ... Still, It'll be nice to have more "native" Euphoria@ARM interpreter.