PropGCC Propeller 2 Bug Fixes - and your chance for first-release Propeller hardware!
![Ken Gracey](https://forums.parallax.com/uploads/userpics/937/nHX7GKXF8OR2S.jpg)
Hello there,
David Betz, Eric Smith and Steve Denson have made significant progress on porting PropGCC to Propeller 2. Internally, we're progressing nicely on using PropGCC on Propeller 1 for a new educational program. These guys really warrant significant testing support from the rest of us for locating bugs. We're interested in both Propeller 1 PropGCC testing (you can pretty much use any board) and with the DE0-Nano and the DE2-115 boards for Propeller 2. The -mp2 command line option builds for P2 code. Again, Propeller 1 testing is just as important as Propeller 2.
The Windows build is here:
http://code.google.com/p/propgcc/downloads/detail?name=prop2gcc-2013-02-26.zip&can=2&q=#makechanges
The reason we want P1 verification is that the developers want to merge their p2tgest branch into the default branch without breaking any P1 support.
There is no Linux of Mac release yet, but request it here if you need one and David Betz will jump in and take care of it for us. Or, you can check out the code and build the "p2test-2013-02-26" tag of the "p2test" branch of the code currently in the Google Code repository:
http://code.google.com/p/propgcc/
What about that Propeller 2 hardware you mentioned, Ken?
That's right! Produce some substantive bug huts for us and we shall reward you! There's no legal agreement, no formality to this offer - I'll just comb the forums and check with a few GCC gurus about who has provided help. And when we have Propeller 2 boards in hand I shall promise to get them to you first, right off the production line and ahead of all other backorders!
We want to release Propeller 2 with a fully-tested multicore C compiler. The whole C toolchain will be open source, multilingual and multi-platform with your help!
Thank you to everybody, ahead of time!
Ken Gracey
David Betz, Eric Smith and Steve Denson have made significant progress on porting PropGCC to Propeller 2. Internally, we're progressing nicely on using PropGCC on Propeller 1 for a new educational program. These guys really warrant significant testing support from the rest of us for locating bugs. We're interested in both Propeller 1 PropGCC testing (you can pretty much use any board) and with the DE0-Nano and the DE2-115 boards for Propeller 2. The -mp2 command line option builds for P2 code. Again, Propeller 1 testing is just as important as Propeller 2.
The Windows build is here:
http://code.google.com/p/propgcc/downloads/detail?name=prop2gcc-2013-02-26.zip&can=2&q=#makechanges
The reason we want P1 verification is that the developers want to merge their p2tgest branch into the default branch without breaking any P1 support.
There is no Linux of Mac release yet, but request it here if you need one and David Betz will jump in and take care of it for us. Or, you can check out the code and build the "p2test-2013-02-26" tag of the "p2test" branch of the code currently in the Google Code repository:
http://code.google.com/p/propgcc/
What about that Propeller 2 hardware you mentioned, Ken?
That's right! Produce some substantive bug huts for us and we shall reward you! There's no legal agreement, no formality to this offer - I'll just comb the forums and check with a few GCC gurus about who has provided help. And when we have Propeller 2 boards in hand I shall promise to get them to you first, right off the production line and ahead of all other backorders!
We want to release Propeller 2 with a fully-tested multicore C compiler. The whole C toolchain will be open source, multilingual and multi-platform with your help!
Thank you to everybody, ahead of time!
Ken Gracey
Comments
Kwabbers - anytime is fine. We appreciate your involvement.
Ken
You could look at it like this: Here is some code that shows you what is actually needed in a runtime to get TCP/IP support.
I have a variety of other interfaces built on top of it for FTP, SMTP, and POP that I will release as well.
I would really like to be involved in developing a network stack for the P2 and I think C is probably the best environment to make that happen, since you can leverage a lot of existing code and it makes the stack more accessible to professionals.
So, if I say "it is not impossible" does that mean that it won't ever get done? :-)
Ouch, don't go round say things are possible, we'll never get anything done:)
Some lunatic managed to get Linux booted on an 8 bit AVR running an ARM emulation. It took, shall we say a short while, to get to the command prompt. So we do have some competition in this area.
What might be more interesting is getting something more reasonable running, like Contiki or FreeRTOS.
Jim
I didn't really think about using PropGCC because I only have the DE0 setup and one cog.
But, I guess LMM will work with just one cog, right? I suppose cog mode would work too...
Is this a hint that I should stop using SPIN and start using PropGCC? Will PropGCC be the same language for both Prop 1 and Prop 2 chips?
Other than Basic, Spin is the only other language I'm learning?
Thanks
Gerg
Maybe we can get Ken to sweeten the deal by having Chip sign the boards. :-)
I have a board signed by Steve Wozniak that I built at a Vintage Computer Festival a while back.
Rayman, should we have positive test results on P2 shuttle this remains a strong possibility for our trusted circle of developers. Chip has spoken of this idea already, and you know that I'd support this concept as well. If it's a possibility you could count on us providing this as a form of appreciation for bug hunters.
I do have an extra DE2 board in my office that I could share in exchange for some extensive testing. Then, you could test both P1 and P2. Let me know if this would be of interest to you. As a strong long-term supporter of the Propeller I would be pleased to lend this board to you if you could make productive use of it.
Sincerely,
Ken Gracey
Gerg, you will be able to use either Spin/ASM or C/ASM. PropGCC will be the same language for both chips, but likely with some additional library support for P2-only functions. The compiler base code is the same, using a switch to choose which processor.
Chip has designed Propeller 2 to have a far more supportive architecture for C. In addition to more memory, higher speed, there's also no Spin interpreter in ROM. This means both language users (Spin or C) will be able to download their own interpreter or kernel to use the language of their choice. I'm certain that both languages are going to be developed to their highest potential since Chip's heart and brain lies with Spin and ASM, yet we've also got a first-class PropGCC team (David Betz, Eric Smith and Steve Denson) developing the C resources. And our internal educational staff has amazing C resources in development. From my point of view, their work has made C almost as easy as PBASIC for the BASIC Stamp, and in some ways easier than Spin (especially for limited, high-level programs).
The tools will also diverge, with two sets.
We will have the Propeller Tool for Windows, supporting Spin. For C we will have Simple IDE (open-source, multi-platform and multilingual). I'm sure the many people on these forums will proceed to develop open tools for Spin, and that we might see it in Simple IDE as well.
Of course I could do this, too. Chip doesn't showboat well, but I could get him to sign some boards for our contributors.
Builds fine with -mp2 in compiler options.
Excellent!!! For an old guy, I really do love my IDEs and building without make files!!
I can only write code that builds simply!
From what I can tell, the main strength (and biggest challenge) of a makefile is to compile each class/file into an object, then link them together. This is, apparently, done for performance reasons. With the relatively small projects that PropGCC is tailored for, I've found it better to simply get rid of all that intermediate stuff and just do a complete compile, every time. Then, all you need to do is something like this:
I still use a makefile, but not for intermediate compilation. I use it so that I can have different targets, so that I don't forget all the flags that I want, and so on. Once you get rid of the compilation-to-object stuff, the makefile becomes much more like a bash script.
Well, that's an offer that's very hard to refuse! There are some things I'd like to try that need more than 1 cog...
Thanks Ken.
Hi Ken,
I really love PropGCC and how Eric, David and Steve made it so easy to program a Propeller in C. I really wanted to use it for my project because the inline assembly makes it really easy to combine PASM with a higher language on the same cog. My project (http://www.propeddle.com) has educational intentions and would really like to not have to ask people to learn Spin -- it's not that I don't like Spin (I do) but while the Propeller plays an important role in my project, I want users to be able to concentrate on the 6502 part of it, so being a processor-specific language, Spin is a distraction.
However, I want to get my project ready in time for the Parallax Conference in May and the bug in GAS that makes it miscalculate immediate operands that refer to Cog memory locations, is a show stopper. Apparently the GCC compiler never generates code that requires this -- you can't get an address of a cog variable from C code so you can't do calculations on those pointers either. Also, it's possible to work around it by adding extra instructions but unfortunately because my code is too time-critical in some places to allow the workarounds. Anyway, I'm forced to (temporarily) convert my project back to Spin and spin-based PASM.
I'm definitely planning on looking into the bug in GAS; I'm thinking of forking Binutils and rewriting some of Eric's code to fix the problem. I'm just running out of time :-(
Edit: Note, this is not intended as a complaint, but to show that I intend to put effort into this. I'm still committed to writing a version of my project in C with inline assembly.
===Jac