Re: Newbie question about porting

[erik@... (Erik Hougaard)]

This list is the perfect place for asking your questions, and welcome!

I would say from what I know, that you will not get Lua to run on that
platform, Lua is running on several embedded platforms, but they are all
32bit and a full ANSI C compiler is available. Im not sure about the stack,
but you might want to consider Lua 3.2 - since the lua_state is a global
variable, in 4.0-> the state is passed as a parameter on every call.

You could also look into some of the Palm Lua implementations....

/e

----- Original Message -----
From: "Frederic Rudman" <frudman@ix.netcom.com>
To: "Multiple recipients of list" <lua-l@tecgraf.puc-rio.br>
Sent: Thursday, January 03, 2002 8:31 PM
Subject: Newbie question about porting


> Hello All, sorry for the posting. I'm not sure yet what the protocol is
for
> this mailing list/newsgroup so I posted it to all. Let me know if that's
> wrong.
>
> I've just found out about Lua and it may be the answer to multiple
problems
> we've been having. In particular, I need to port a reasonably strong/high
> level interpreted language to a very small footprint device. Lua certainly
> fits that.
>
> My first question is: how native-stack hungry is the interpreter/vm (we'll
> only use the interpreter in the device: all compilation/parsing will be
done
> "offline" on a regular workstation). Specifically, we have less than 300
> words of stack available in the machine for everything. Is that OK for the
> Lua VM? Will it be close? Is the stack used dependant on the Lua program
> being run or can it be computed to a fixed amount? Or is it a "Stack is
way
> too small. No way Lua VM will ever run on that device"?
>
> Question 2: the cpu for this device is an old TMS320 from TI with 16-bit
> bytes! How much tinkering will I need in order to port the Lua VM? A lot?
A
> little? I know there'll be at least a little because at first glance I've
> noticed that the generated code (from luac) seems to be 8-bit-byte
oriented
> (right?).
>
> Question 3: This device does not have the regular ANSI-C library of
modules
> but we did implement some of the basics (malloc, strcmp, ...) but only a
few
> of these. Does anyone know which modules I'll need to implement to compile
> and run the vm on this new environment (or where to go to find out about
> these modules).
>
> Question 4: Has anyone in this newsgroup ported the Lua VM to 16-bit byte
> machines? What's your general conclusion about that?
>
> I know that's a lot of questions, and I apologize for that. I'm new to
this
> but I promise I'll learn fast!
>
> Sincerely,
> Frederic Rudman
>
>
>