🚀 go-pugleaf

tw@cscosl.UUCP writes:

[re-posting of Skip's article deleted...]

> This question might be a naive one (since I don't know anything about Idris):
> 	Could you use MW C to develop software under Idris?

No, not without a fair amount of trickery.  The trickery involves creating
a header for the binary that would trick Idris into thinking that said
binary is a legit Idris executable.  It would also have to be tagged as
an "absolute" binary, meaning that it can only ever be located at a specific
address.  This is because Idris would not understand any relocatin info
in an MWC binary (if such exists).  All Idris executables have relocation
info so that at exec time, Idris can locate the program anywhere in memory.
It is worthwhile to note that this is different from "position independent
code".

>         (I guess I'm trying to decide whether a poor student
>          such as I could get away with not purchasing the 
>          Idris PS system - if I were to purchase it at all.)

I'm afraid not, unless you are a poor but very clever student with lots
of time on his hands.


> The prices  quoted in the article seem to be extremely reasonable.  However,
> I wonder how worthwhile it would be to develop software for Idris.  Although
> it appears to be a fairly extensive Unix-like environment (correct?), I don't
> see a market (at least an ST/Mega market) for it.  I suppose the target
> market wasn't supposed to be the ST/Mega but any Unix-supporting environment?
> Can you port source-level code written under Idris to other Unix machines
> without modifications?

Last I knew, Idris was targeted at folks who develop under Unix at work,
and might want a low-priced Unix box at home.  It is also targeted at
those who might need a Unix (like) based system at work, but can't quite
afford a low-end Sun or other such system  (Yes, the 3/50's are inexpensive,
but then you need to add a big disk and screaming tape, which bumps the
entry price quite a bit).

Code targeted for Idris can be easily ported to other Unix environments
as long as you stay away from Idris-specific things, such as shared
memory, and the IPC facility, to name two.  These are also found in
System V and Berkeley, but the Idris implementation is different than
either of those.

As for porting from Unix to Idris, it's not bad.  Idris is very System V
like.  I have Moria running on my ST, as an example.

> One last question:  What system configuration does one need to have to use
> Idris as a reasonable fast tool?  I have a 20meg hd, but from what I hear
> about other systems supporting flavors of Unix, the environment takes up lots
> of room.  This isn't really that an important a question, but I'm curious as
> to Idris' size.

Strongly reccomend a 1040 and a 20 Meg disk as a base configuration.  Idris
and its utilities don't take too much room, but if you insist on keeping
all the library conbinations around (e.g., 68020 libraries, single-precision
floating point, Pascal, et. al.), they add some heft to the whole system.
Figure on less than five megs of disk for the whole shot (I can get a more
exact estimate from my system, if you like).

I have an older version without the hooks for X-windows, and that version
of Idris consumes just more than 500K of ram when running (I have a 520
block ram-disk installed, which accounts for a lot of that).

[deleted]
 
> Tom Wolf
> ARPA (I think): tw@cscosl.ncsu.edu
>            or wolf@csclea.ncsu.edu

#include <std_disclaimer>



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