P1 Development Update on Linux
Botulism
Posts: 18
in Propeller 1
The larger machine that I work for has some strong reservations about Windows 11. These people were not exactly impressed with the amount of work they had to perform with other Windows transitions. Linux is taking over in these particular institutions. We are still dependent on the P1 and our end-user experience. Is there a single source of news or is someone actively working on any way to develop for the P1 using a GUI environment like VSC or the IDEs produced by Parallax that simply works without too many tricks or will be working in the near-ish future?
Comments
PropellerIDE and SimpleIDE both are available for Debian-based Linux systems and can be downloaded from Parallax's website (https://www.parallax.com/download/propeller-1-software/). I occasionally run Linux on an Intel-based Mac laptop and have installed and used both IDEs without "tricks". They're also available compiled for ARM (Raspberry Pi).
There is another option that frees you from the operating system dependency as long as you can run an ANSI compatible terminal on your system. It's been there for many years now.
And that option is Tachyon Forth by @"Peter Jakacki" that runs on the P1 itself.
You can find it here.
VS Code in particular works pretty OK, but doesn't really have any of PropTool's spin-specific features. You'd use a command line compiler with it. There's
openspin, a port of the standard Parallax Spin compiler, but there's alsoflexspin, which can compile either to really fast and big code OR really small and slightly faster code, depending on the need.Many thanks! The .deb packages have been reviewed in the past and, well, someone with more influence than I nixed those options.
Forth on the other hand is starting to look very interesting--for current problems and some future ones. I completely forgot about it!
Is Tachyon still in active development? Any "gotchas" I should know about? There's not a lot of data out there. Is there a solid-defacto source of info?
Check the ForthSpace here.
Tachyon is a mature product now, battle tested in the real life projects and commercial ones too. Lots of info is to be found under the @"Peter Jakacki"'s signature links, (signature) visible after you are logged in.
https://www.parallax.com/propeller-2/programming-tools/
Eric's Flexspin/FlexProp is actively developed and supports Prop1 - https://github.com/totalspectrum/spin2cpp/releases
Same for Ross's (C only) Catalina - https://sourceforge.net/projects/catalina-c/
@Botulism
As someone who's never used Forth, let alone Tachyon, I can probably still agree that you'll get the best performance (read as: compromise between speed, memory usage, and code size) with Tachyon. But you'll have to pay the price up front with a steep learning curve for the language itself and then no "IDE" like you might get from a full blown Visual Studio/Eclipse/JetBrains experience. It's up to you whether or not that's a trade-off you're willing to make.
For me, it hasn't been. So I made PropWare. And I made it on Linux first, with Windows only as the ugly step child, so I'm confident that it will work "without too many tricks" for your use case. It isn't exactly in "active development" anymore, but I do still live and breathe code and am happy to address any glaring issues that crop up. PropWare gives you easy access to a popular open source build system (CMake) utilizing PropGCC as the compiler. Bundled with the PropWare distributables are a number of common libraries - each of which can be selectively enabled or disabled in the build system. And because PropWare utilizes CMake - and uses it in the way CMake was intended to be used, not hacked together - PropWare works seamlessly with any IDE that supports CMake. I'd recommend giving it a try with CLion, but it would work just as well with VSCode's CMake plugin or Eclipse.
https://david.zemon.name/PropWare
The OP asked about IDEs, so it's probably FlexProp that they'll want (https://github.com/totalspectrum/flexprop). For Linux it's best to build from source, there are directions in the README. FlexProp is developed on Linux, so it will always work on that platform.
Still using BST. Still my preferred system for P1. Wlorking on mint 20.2. Just needed to install the 32 bit compatibility libs. BST has a GUI.
I have another problem running debian 11. The propeller ide written for debian is based on the qt4 libraries. After version 10, debian doesn't support the qt4 libraries. It won't let me build from source either. Has anyone updated propelleride to use qt5 libraries?
@shafe
What errors are you encountering during the build? Can you paste the output of the build into a file and attach? I haven't used PropellerIDE in a few years but am able to build it fine on Ubuntu 20.04, which I'd think should be close enough.