circle VS crosstalk

If you're a developer and feeling adventurous, you can also try building it yourself. The source is all on GitHub. It uses the circle-stdlib project (which is circle plus some additions to support much of the C and C++ standard libraries) as a submodule; hopefully I've set that up correctly, but you could always clone that separately and place it in the MiniScript-Pi folder. Check out circle's build instructions for info on setting up your toolchain. (Mac users: be careful with the configure script, which does not work properly on MacOS; find me on Discord and I'll help you fix the script or configure manually.)

I suggest checking out circle https://github.com/rsta2/circle since it's basically a library for the pi hardware. I'm doing some experiments with it myself now.

You can also run a Pi without an operating system, programming it in C or C++ probably. See for example: GitHub - rsta2/circle: A C++ bare metal environment for Raspberry Pi with USB (32 and 64 bit)

BMC64 is VICE in a trenchcoat unikernel / bare-metal framework called Circle: https://github.com/rsta2/circle

It uses the circle library (https://github.com/rsta2/circle) to provide a minimal runtime (mainly to interface with the hardware).

I experimented with circle the other day (https://github.com/rsta2/circle) Looks promising, and most likely within your knowledge of C/C++ development.

Natively would be amazing but a vast amount of work.

The way Apple moved classic MacOS from 680x0 to PowerPC was to write a tiny kernel emulator, with an API to run native stuff on the metal, and run more or less the whole OS under emulation, profile it and just translate the most speed-critical bits.

That's a lot of work for a FOSS project but given the performance delta between 1980s 680x0 and 2020s ARM, total emulation of the whole thing should be perfectly fine. It's how the PiStorm Amiga upgrade works.

https://amigastore.eu/853-pistorm.html

So all I envision is something like Aranym:

https://aranym.github.io/

... running on top of Ultibo, say:

https://ultibo.org/

Or maybe Circle:

https://github.com/rsta2/circle

Circle is a C++ bare metal programming environment for the Raspberry Pi.

The only other reasonable option would be to port it to a new platform which is popular that has a few well documented hardware interfaces so as not to create a hellish nightmare writing drivers. Maybe then you could do a one-off port to that platform (though you might have to re-target the HolyC compiler to target it instead if it is not x86_64). The Raspberry PI seems like a decent option here since there is already a baremetal C++ library supporting USB, keyboard, mouse, sound, video, and as an added bonus UART, I2C, SPI, GPIO. You would have good code examples for porting all the necessary drivers. But obviously this would still be a lot of work and the compiler would need to be re-targeted and user space adapted for running on ARM. That being said backwards compatibility is strong, ARM seems actually interested in keeping it that way (at least for now). The library I'm talking about is here: https://github.com/rsta2/circle

I don't know why this popped up again now, but it's nice to see that some people are still interested in this little Smalltalk 80 system (I'm the author, happy to answer your questions...).

Code at https://github.com/michaelengel/crosstalk

Your concept looks nice, it reminds me a bit of the Lisperati: https://www.hackster.io/news/the-lisperati1000-is-a-cyberdec...

So, did you consider Lisp or maybe Smalltalk? Plan 9 or Inferno might also be options.

Plan 9 comes in different variants, the "classic" one (with a Raspberry Pi port by Richard Miller) or 9front, an Inferno porting tutorial can be found at https://github.com/yshurik/inferno-rpi

Lisp and Smalltalk can run with or without Linux underneath, e.g. on the Raspberry Pi.

Bare-metal Lisp is available with interim: http://interim-os.com

Finally, bare-metal Smalltalk is available in my crosstalk system: https://github.com/michaelengel/crosstalk

Of course, Lisp and Smalltalk can also run hosted under Linux, e.g. using Squeak (https://squeak.org), Pharo (https://pharo.org) or InterLisp (https://github.com/Interlisp/medley).

Or - a crazy idea - build an emacs-only machine. That would be fun! :)

Author here - this xv6 port to the D1 (based on the riscv64 xv6 version developed at MIT) is an experimentation vehicle for me and my students since working with qemu alone can be a bit boring and it's easier to test some feature in a tiny OS. Of course, it's also fun to work on it...

"...won't be big and professional like gnu." :)

Based on the experiences with xv6, we are also working on porting some other non-mainstream systems to RISC-V hardware, including Plan 9, Inferno, Oberon, Smalltalk-80 (see my Raspberry Pi bare metal ARM version at https://github.com/michaelengel/crosstalk) and the f9 microkernel.

If you have any questions about the xv6 port just ask.

Shameless plug - I'm looking for a PhD student to work on OS/compiler/architecture-related topics in my research group here at Bamberg University (in the northern part of Bavaria in Germany).

If you know someone who might be interested, please let them know...

What if those already-used tools weren't as-good for writing Smalltalk programs?

----

> … its own OS and GUI.

Well there are examples of bare metal Smalltalk (I'm guessing we could say the same of Java?)

    https://github.com/michaelengel/crosstalk

Well, you can run a bare metal Smalltalk-80 on the Raspberry Pi.

https://github.com/michaelengel/crosstalk

- NetBSD (https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/evbarm/raspberry_pi/)

- FreeBSD (https://wiki.freebsd.org/arm/Raspberry%20Pi)

- Interim Lisp OS (http://interim-os.com - this runs on Raspi 2 only, so porting to the ARM v6 in the Raspi 1 would be a nice project) - btw., this is a project by Lukas Hartmann, who is also the creator of the open MNT Reform ARM laptop (https://mntre.com)

- (shameless plug) my bare metal "crosstalk" Smalltalk-80 (https://github.com/michaelengel/crosstalk)

I'm pretty sure this list isn't complete...

Some operating systems are not supported at the moment:

- OpenBSD only seems to support the Aarch64-based models 3 and 4

- Haiku seems to be looking for a maintainer for the Raspberry port