Re: [ECOS] python?

["Gary D. Thomas" <gary dot thomas at mind dot be>]

On Sun, 2003-03-09 at 12:25, Shannon Holland wrote:
> 
> On Sunday, March 9, 2003, at 06:14  AM, Gary Thomas wrote:
> 
> > I have done this in the past (and actually, I'm playing with the
> > latest Python on eCos at the moment).  It's a non-trivial experience.
> > As mentioned previously, Python is very file oriented, so you need
> > a file system of some sort.  It's also not small - the version I've
> > been experimenting with is pretty big (which means ethernet downloading
> > is pretty much a necessity):
> > [gthomas at hermes Python-2.3a2]$ powerpc-eabi-size python
> >    text    data     bss     dec     hex filename
> > 1244460 1576988  701564 3523012  35c1c4 python
> >
> > What sort of "prototyping" did you have in mind?
> > What kind of functionality were you expecting to utilize?
> >
> > BTW - I sent this reply using Python running on an embedded PowerPC
> > system running eCos :-)
> >
> 
> I was planning to get a compact flash card and use that for the OS file 
> system - figured these things would get rather large plus it's a lot 
> faster for copying lots of stuff. The board has ethernet as well, so 
> that will be useful once I get it all going.
> 

This biggest obstacle you'll have here is that we don't [currently] have
any file systems suitable for the compact flash device.

> What sort of things did you have to do to python? Were they general to 
> ecos or more specific to your environment?
> 

Being one of the members of the original eCos team, my interests are 
more in eCos - how to make it more useful, making sure that it works
well with user applications (like Python), etc.

> I'm basically working on a fairly complicated data analysis application 
> along with user interface. I was looking for something that had good 
> existing libraries for numerical analysis, gui frameworks as well as 
> just an abundance of basic data structures. These things all exist in 
> C, but I also wanted a language which is suited towards getting things 
> going quickly as well as being easy to make larger changes (something 
> where C or C++ isn't so great in my experience - don't want to start a 
> language flame-war though!). Python or java would work well for this, 
> python looks to be more flexible and is very easy to extend with native 
> code so I've been leaning in that direction (I've done lots of Java 
> programming but not too much python yet).
> 
> I also wanted an environment where I could do a lot of development on 
> my OS X laptop and then easily move it over to the target environment. 
> In the past I've always structured my code so that I can compile and 
> run both in a simulator and a target environment, but an emulated 
> language would work very well here as well.

This is one of the cool things about Python - the exact same code 
can be used on the embedded device as on a desktop, etc.

-- 
.--------------------------------------------------------.
|       Mind: Embedded Linux and eCos Development        |
|--------------------------------------------------------|
| Gary Thomas              email:  gary dot thomas at mind dot be   |
| Mind ( http://mind.be )  tel:    +1 (970) 229-1963     |
| gpg: http://www.chez-thomas.org/gary/gpg_key.asc       |
'--------------------------------------------------------'


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