Leveraging SPIN/PASM assets

Invent-O-Doc

Based upon the documentation, there appears to be ways to run PASM and compiled SPIN code. It there a way to leverage SPIN objects within a GCC project? For example, device or video drivers?

jazzed

PASM drivers can be leveraged, but not full SPIN objects straight from the OBEX. We create C interface code to PASM in several drivers today.

When I asked about adding support for full SPIN objects within the Propeller GCC context Parallax said no. It is not impossible to add support for SPIN objects, it's just not a Propeller-GCC feature.

Invent-O-Doc

Interesting, Jazz. The GCC is and the ability to leverage multiple memory models is a significant achievement. My concern about omitting support for SPIN objects is that it fragments the Propeller code base.

Kye

This route was chosen at the time to get the product out the door. I guess the issue could be revisted later.

ersmith

There is a spin2cpp tool that will automatically convert many .spin files (including ones containing PASM) to C++:

http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php?137346-Updated-Spin-to-C-translator

At the moment it's a command line only tool, but if there's demand I'm sure we could figure out a way to hook it up to the IDE.

Eric

ersmith

The spin2cpp project is now hosted at http://code.google.com/p/spin2cpp.

It can automatically convert a number of the "gold standard" OBEX objects from Spin/PASM to C++. There are some demos included in the package, and some rudimentary documentation -- more documentation needs to be done, and user input is appreciated!