Re: Lua OS

[Justin Cormack <justin@...>]

On Mon, Feb 18, 2013 at 6:07 AM, David Olofson <david@olofson.net> wrote:

Dealing with specific address ranges (VGA framebuffer, for example) is
harder. Not sure if it's possible to "inject" memory areas like that
without upsetting the GC. Not sure if it's much point either, without
a bunch of array types and similar, so you can actually map meaningful
operations onto those memory blocks. The typical, nice and easy way
would be to just use a native library for that - a bit like how
ancient BASIC dialects used PEEK/POKE and the like, only a bit more
structured. :-)

Well thats the Lua on RiscOS solution, pretty much provide peek and poke, see Gavin's talk here http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/home/adapting-lua-to-an-old-os

As Steve mentions, I have been working on ljsyscall for Linux, LuaJIT only for now (Lua port will come). This mostly deals with system call and socket APIs, so mostly structs, plus memory allocation.

Another project (also LuaJIT) is Snabb switch https://github.com/SnabbCo/snabbswitch which has native device drivers talking direct to the ethernet card; it runs under Linux but doesn't use much as the driver does just talk to the hardware (which is memory mapped).

Justin