[HN Gopher] Bare metal Smalltalk-80 port to the Raspberry Pi
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Bare metal Smalltalk-80 port to the Raspberry Pi
Author : salgernon
Score : 109 points
Date : 2020-07-17 19:07 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| johndoe0815 wrote:
| Author here - happy to answer your questions...
|
| Beware, there's a bug on ARM11-based Raspberry Pis (BCM2835 on Pi
| 1/Zero/Zero W and CM1) that crashes the VM when executing drawing
| functions. I'm currently investigating the problem.
| johndoe0815 wrote:
| Btw., you can read a bit about the background of Smalltalk and
| the Raspberry port in my article:
|
| https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/relive-part-xerox-parcs-histo...
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I wonder if there's anything neat that could be done in the
| Smalltalk VM that could take advantage of the BCM SOC's VPU etc.
| hardware ... hmm...
| johndoe0815 wrote:
| Accelerating the Smalltalk VM BitBlt primitives using the VPU
| would certainly be interesting. Currently, drawing is rather
| slow since lots of the functionality is implemented in
| interpreted bytecodes and rendering to the framebuffer is
| completely unoptimized.
| zackangelo wrote:
| Slight tangent, but: I first encountered a function named
| BitBlt when using the Win32 C API a long time ago. I had no
| idea that it originated in Smalltalk-72 in 1975 and the
| function name was just carried forward into the Windows API.
| johndoe0815 wrote:
| BitBlt was also used as the drawing primitive for an early
| graphics terminal developed at Bell Labs, the appropriately
| named "Blit"
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blit_(computer_terminal).
| Hardware implementations of BitBlt were available in the
| Amiga and Atari ST blitter chips (that's how I learned
| about BitBlt in the late '80s).
|
| Btw., there's a nice paper on BitBlt by Rob Pike:
| https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/~rsc/pike84bitblt.pdf
| salgernon wrote:
| "Past" submission didn't find anything, but the author had an
| "Ask HN" the other day:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23806323
| johndoe0815 wrote:
| It was actually submitted twice before, but both submissions
| linked to the linkedin article, not directly to the github
| repository.
| johndoe0815 wrote:
| Thanks for mentioning this - I would certainly appreciate input
| on this. Testing software on half a dozen different Raspberry
| Pi models currently involves quite a bit of cable un- and
| replugging...
| slobiwan wrote:
| I love the idea of bare-metal ports to the Pi. I saw snakeware
| posted here not too long ago. Are there other examples?
| ColorForth would be interesting as well
| johndoe0815 wrote:
| In addition to the Interim Lisp system I mentioned in another
| comment, there are a number of bare-metal applications for the
| Raspberry on github (mostly ports of games).
|
| I especially like this Commodore 64 emulator (also based on
| circle): https://github.com/randyrossi/bmc64
| 7thaccount wrote:
| Seems like a neat idea. I've always wanted a tiny LispOS or
| SmalltalkOS that I could carry around and use on a Pi. I just
| wish it would also have the modern necessities like web
| browser...etc.
| johndoe0815 wrote:
| One of the inspirations for my "crosstalk" Smalltalk system was
| Lukas Hartmann's Lisp-based "Interim OS" bare-metal system for
| the Raspberry (http://interim-os.com/), so you might want to
| give this a try.
|
| I think Interim only runs on the Raspberry Pi 2 at the moment;
| porting Interim OS to use the circle library (which I use for
| crosstalk) should also be feasible and would help to support
| other Raspberry versions.
|
| Lukas is also the creator of the MNT Reform open source
| notebook (using a Freescale i.MX8 quadcore ARM Cortex-A53) -
| see https://www.crowdsupply.com/mnt/reform for the currently
| running crowdfunding campaign.
|
| Modern web browsing is, of course, more complex than the whole
| rest of the Smalltalk system...
| skissane wrote:
| I really like language-based operating systems. It is cool
| you did this.
|
| My ideal though would be - it is all written in the language
| (Smalltalk/Lisp/whatever), with no use of other languages
| such as C/C++ (except possibly assembler, in which case my
| ideal is it comes with an assembler written in the language);
| and it is fully self-hosting in terms of the build process.
|
| Of course, I realise my ideal is a lot more work than what
| you've done, and none of us has infinite time in which to
| tinker with things...
|
| (I myself have some toy programming language interpreters I
| wrote, some in C, some in Java - I keep on thinking "oh, I
| should get rid of the C/Java, make it generate native code
| and then rewrite its core in itself" - but that's a lot of
| work and I've never had time for that.)
| johndoe0815 wrote:
| Great that you like it - thanks! Some of the work of
| Stephen R. Kell at Kent University also covers language-
| based OSes and how some of their ideas might be adapted in
| Unix (see [1] and [2]).
|
| The Smalltalk-80 VM is specified in Smalltalk itself (in
| the "Blue Book" [3]) and the Squeak VM (a Smalltalk
| derivative) was written in a subset of Squeak itself [4].
|
| The great thing is that it's a lot of fun to build this (at
| least for me) because it's actually possible to understand
| the whole system. I hope my students will have fun working
| on topics like these, too.
|
| [1] Unix, Plan 9 and the Lurking Smalltalk. In L. de Mol
| and G. Primiero (eds), Reflections on Programming Systems,
| Philosophical Studies Series, Springer - https://www.cs.ken
| t.ac.uk/people/staff/srk21/research/papers...
|
| [2] The operating system: should there be one?. In
| Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Programming Languages
| and Operating Systems, ACM, November 2013 - https://www.cs.
| kent.ac.uk/people/staff/srk21/research/papers...
|
| [3] Adele Goldberg and David Robson, Smalltalk-80: The
| Language and its Implementation, ISBN 0-201-11371-6 - http:
| //stephane.ducasse.free.fr/FreeBooks/BlueBook/Bluebook....
|
| [4] Dan Ingalls, Ted Kaehler, John Maloney, Scott Wallace,
| and Alan Kay. "Back to The Future: The Story of Squeak, A
| Practical Smalltalk Written in Itself." In Proceedings of
| the 12th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented
| Programming (OOPSLA) 1997, 318-26, 1997 -
| http://files.squeak.org/docs/OOPSLA.Squeak.html
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