How long to wait for the MAC version of SPIN?
DavidM
Posts: 626
Hi,
Is there any word on when the MAC OSX version of SPIN will come out?
I have a PC ( which I borrowed from my brother) and its full of viruses and stuff, It does work fine for the PROPELLOR but I have 3 macs in the office ( none of them are intel based), which I do all my other work and programming on.
I refuse to connect my PC to my network, as It may get more virus's and stuff. but I need to copy and paste code to my mac so I can use this forum ( currently I am using a CD for transfers)
I also don't want to spend money on PARALLELS and especially WINDOWS, to make SPIN run on a mac, I would rather buy more prop chips and stuff.
I would be even happy to PAY for a MAC version!
I actually think there are a whole lot of MAC users out there that want to get into MICRO CONTROLLERS using the MAC platform.
regards
Dave M
Is there any word on when the MAC OSX version of SPIN will come out?
I have a PC ( which I borrowed from my brother) and its full of viruses and stuff, It does work fine for the PROPELLOR but I have 3 macs in the office ( none of them are intel based), which I do all my other work and programming on.
I refuse to connect my PC to my network, as It may get more virus's and stuff. but I need to copy and paste code to my mac so I can use this forum ( currently I am using a CD for transfers)
I also don't want to spend money on PARALLELS and especially WINDOWS, to make SPIN run on a mac, I would rather buy more prop chips and stuff.
I would be even happy to PAY for a MAC version!
I actually think there are a whole lot of MAC users out there that want to get into MICRO CONTROLLERS using the MAC platform.
regards
Dave M
Comments
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Paul Baker
Propeller Applications Engineer
Parallax, Inc.
Thats a shame, one of the reasons I chose the PROP ( besides it great features) was the mention of PC Version first followed by a MAC version later?
regards
Dave M
There are Mac users out there (myself included), but that doesn't make it practical (think - affordable) for Parallax to make a Mac version, particularly with the ability to run Windows at full speed on newer Macs.
Post Edited (Mike Green) : 2/11/2007 12:12:25 AM GMT
That said, we are sensitive to the desires of our customers and while it isn't possible to do everything every customer wants us to do, we can sometimes take steps to serve a large number of customer requests. Now don't take what I'm about to say as any sort of promise, but when the creator returns from vacation we will be having discussions on providing libraries so that customers can develop thier own version of the tool on the OS of thier choice. Judging by the amount of discussion going on about this, undoubtedly they will take them and run a breakneck pace to develop the alternative OS tools.
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Paul Baker
Propeller Applications Engineer
Parallax, Inc.
I think i got exited when I read about the COMPILER/LIBRARY ?? which can then be used by other 3rd party developers.
I think I read this too quickly as well.
sorry bout that.
Don't forget, I don't mind paying for an application ( i.e SPIN) especially if its used everyday!
I am not sure how others feel about paying for the applications.
Anyhow, I just have to get my PC networked and cleaned up, so I can communicate easier with this forum and its users.
Thanks Paul
regards
Dave M.
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Paul Baker
Propeller Applications Engineer
Parallax, Inc.
Propeller and Operating System:
"we do intend to develop and provide a Propeller Compiler library that third parties may use to compile Propeller applications on Macs and Linux operating systems. The timeline for this has not been set at this point, but we will likely be working on this solution the latter half of this year." (2006)
It seems me that only they were centered too much in Windows, many very good tools exist to create you program multi-platform. For example, use KiCad in Linux, but some they use it in Windows (exists another version for MacOS), and they are available in a same time. That is because they are using the adequate tools.
I codified Klinton in Linux and in some days had a version for Windows, because use Lazarus. Another example mine X52.
The community of Lazarus/FPC is very friendly, any question will be attended.
It's one of those things, that if you don't ask, you don't get!
How about a customer survey asking..
1) What Platform PC / LINUX / MAC etc ?
2) How much are you willing to pay for?
This might give you an Idea, the money will certainly help with development cost etc..
I wonder how many MAC users out there are wanting to get into MICROPROCESSOR dev?
regards
Dave Metus
Parallax made the determination that thier business is in selling hardware not software, so we never (at least that I'm aware of) have charged for any software we have written. It's highly unlikely that we will start now. What would happen is our releasing libraries (free) that other 3rd parties could use to to create thier own tools. Whatever environment is used to create the tool (gtk, eclipse, python, java, ...) is entirely upto the 3rd party.
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Paul Baker
Propeller Applications Engineer
Parallax, Inc.
Haha yeah I bought a new Toshiba laptop just for programming, fast, sleek, nice display. There is a built in finger pad (to substitute in the absence of a mouse). I hate those built in things, and use a real USB mouse instead. However, you cannot disable the finger pad no matter how many times you select "disable" in the control panel. I hit that finger pad 50 times a day, and have to go back and make corrections just as many times where the cursor has moved.
This is just one example of why I would be happy to pay for a Mac version.
Besides.. all they seem to sell (as a new) are Vista. And there's way too much hw-driver issues with those.
I "blew" $5000 on fishing lures last year alone, so who am I to say you should or should not offer to pay.
I am, and others here are consultants, I do not have a MAC, but have owned the motorolla ones in the past, and have access to Macs.
Get me a High level of what you want, I'll put a SOW Together and give you an estimate, my hourly rate is $125.00 an hour to delivery/accesptance, then after 30 days is $90 an hour.
Even if I had access to the asm libraries, To Write a pretty IDE from scratch that looks and feels like propeller.exe and really works. My high level estimate of design/constuction/unit testing/qa/and delivery will be in the thousands.
Parallax knows the cost of software development, (Ask Asterick how much time he spent on Gear using C# (a farily rapid language). I am sure it was hundreds of hours if not more.)
Say they Spent $5000.00 on construction/qa of a Mac version, Then the would also need to train the helpdesk to support it, Technical writers to document it, forum moderation. (Social security and insurace cost of all those peoples time)
They have to ask themselves, how many will we deliver?/Sell..... If they give it away, they eat into their profit margin as it is a cost center hole. / If they charge for it, then everyone will be mad at them because, "its not fair that the windows one is free"
If Parallax can get us a command line compiler source in c, then we all can build anything you want.
PM any cobsultant here and they can oblige you in your every whim then, At a cost.
Or wait around, use your pc for now, and you will probably get what you want from the open source community.
If your a Good Programmer, you could start writing a nice IDE for the mac, that is extensible for when a compiler is available!
If your not, then no better time to start.
FYI, Bass, its BassMASTER I am not a Fish! hehe just kiddin.
Notepad / or any Text editor
calculator apps
spreadsheet apps
html browsers
Microsht added so many bells and whistles to Excel that I had to read 2 books to be proficiant on it for work.
Web development is full of so much crud now that mozilla and IE7 can no longer access my Banks websits, so I have to use another pc with ie6 to get to it!.
KISS is where its at, propeller.exe is simple to use, I would like some bells and whistles there though, like hit the dot and have it pop up the public methods,
But back in the day, Pbasic for DOS was where it was at (The main reason for parallax's success IMHO) I could run it on my IPAQ in a dos emulator! or linux in DOSEMU
By the time Parallax writes an IDE for the mac, someone will have already open sourced a way to program the prop through the mac.
I am part of the solution here, I am writing in anci c c2spin and c2asm methods that for now just output .spin files, later I can plug it in the compiler project on sourceforge, for me it is just a fun challnge.
www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/browse/name?app_id=2904
The Tool sorta works with Codeweaver now, so it just might be that some help from interested parties would put things over the top.
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They don't want to... and I can't blame them.
There is an upside and a downside to every approach to business... I like the track that Parallax has followed and hope they never change.
If Apple offered to pay an employee or two to come to Parallax and work under the "Brother's" guidance, that might work. But... can Apple be trusted?
Rich
I think it would be just perfect... if Mac users had to pay... while everyone else got it for free[noparse]:)[/noparse]
Yes... I even bought a Lisa... and I still have a NEXT box with less than 40 man hours of use.
Rich
I honestly believe that the most interesting synergy is between the Propeller and a Public Domain ... government support, image processing program called ImageJ... it is Java... and is multiplatformed. But it is also available for commercial "wrapping."
I would strongly encourage independent, development minded individuals or companies to take a look at it. I think there are going to be real markets for such a combo... a year or two down the line.
Rich
I like building things, but building something like this just isn't worth the energy & frustration. Really loved my NEXT Cube (and my UTeks for that matter) but I understand that to get some stuff to work you just must have the required platform.
Myself, I wouldn't write an entire IDE. My first choice would be to hook it up to the free and very capable IDE from Apple, Xcode. If that was somehow not possible (not sure how that could be the case since it hooks up to the gnu compiler collection), then I'd use the Eclipse IDE which is already being used as an embedded development in this way by a number of hardware manufacturers (though I'd prefer to use Xcode myself).
Regards,
haikusw
P.S. would prefer you remove the emoticons thing on the left - it's jamming processor and annoyingly distracting.
I'm not a Parallax employee, but an observation ... While all of their development tools are free, they are considered very proprietary and, I'm sure, will not be made open source. They have made it very clear that they have no plans to release a non-Windows version of the compiler and the reasons all have to do with the fact that they have very limited resources (Chip is busy and he wrote the compiler in assembly language and there's only one other systems programmer there (Jeff Martin - who wrote the IDE) and he's busy).
It may be that Parallax will eventually release a Windows command-line compiler. There's been a little discussion of that possibility. I've been able to run the current IDE, at least to compile programs , under CrossOver Desktop (with some minor glitches). Maybe the command-line compiler would run under Wine on an Intel Mac.
Post Edited (Mike Green) : 5/27/2007 4:14:16 PM GMT
I don't understand why you'd want to make your tools proprietary, so likely that's the piece missing from my analysis. Wouldn't you want as many people as possible using your chip so you could sell millions and millions of them? Wouldn't you want your microprocessor to take the world by storm and leave all the others in the dust - especially if you had created a ground-breaking new disruptive technology?
They've documented the chip's command set (in ASM), so wherein is the value in keeping the higher level and more usable language proprietary? If you look at language development and popularity across the software development horizon, the one's that are standardized and open source are the ones that "win".
As an Apple Mac based developer of 20 years, I'd sure like to be able to use their cool new chip, but I have zero interest in running windows. That means I have to make my own compiler or look at a different micro-controller, which is a shame since this one looks like it's the innovative leading edge, which is where Mac people usually like to be.
I'm surprised that they wrote their compiler in assembler. I haven't built a compiler in 20 years (since back in school), but even then yacc and lex and so on were pretty much coming into the world as the way to do such a thing. Especially on modern hardware where the speed of the compiler is not really that big a deal. I guess maybe they want the generated code to be optimized heavily, but again - why would they want to keep the techniques for doing this secret?
Admittedly not knowing a great deal about embedded software development, if I were making a custom chip, seems like I'd based my development tools on the gnu compiler collection and leverage all the decades of work that have gone into optimizing that toolchain and the 10s of thousands of developers who have and are working on it to make it better.
oh well. Guess I'll think about how interested in this chip I am and see if I'm interested enough to take the lead in writing a compiler/assembler for it myself and start an open source project to do so. Probably not (less time now that I'm older and have a family).
luck.
Here's a thread you might check out:
http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php?p=611536
I'd really like to have some native tools for MacOSX, that I have to install some windows (virtualized) to be able to run the IDE (and some logic analyzer soft) doesn't buy me. Simple command line compilers, that run on multiple platforms are not rocket science, especially due to the limited amount of memory the Propeller has. (btw, I really do not believe the compiler was programmed in assembler. as there is zero gain, and Delphi is more than capable of such a simple task). As I do not want to use windows that much, I'm working on an assembler (only for now) simulator, but in Java (from the start GPL). I'll add it an assembler too, because I'm interested in assembly programming, so testing the programs before would be very helpful. I'll post it as-soon-as-it-does-something-useful.
The GEAR emulation tool will give you an *excellent* idea of what opcodes the spin language is translated into. Conceptually it's not a huge step to go from there and reverse-engineer your way to an open source spin compiler. If all those engineers out there have all that time to devote to an open source tool, then why not get on with it? I'd love to (and could) write the open source version - buit simply don't have the time! So, instead, I've try to make little enhancements to GEAR. Primarily to make my life easier, but I'm willing to share it with others. I didn't write GEAR, and I hugely admire Asterik for taking the time to do it - It was/is a substantial commitment on his part. If he did no more to the cause of an open source tool, then he would have done as much as anyone else is likely to do.
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It's not all that hard to count the number of grains of sand on the beach. The hardest part is making a start - after that it just takes time.·· Mirror - 15 May 2007
The point is, all that reverse engineering is a pain when you could be programming instead
And it's TOTALLY unnecessary. If only they made this part open source so those of us who prefer not to use windows can use their cool chip!
besides, GEAR only runs on windows - I'm not that interested in spending that much time in windows when there are so many cool things I can program, without reverse engineering an emulator, on the mac.
Thanks for pointing it out though. If I get desperate enough to program the propeller chip, who knows, I might get motivated to spend that much time in windows. Might be easier just to use their windows developer tools at that point though...
Personally, the chip is worth it. (and I really don't like win32 either, but it's no biggie) The assembly language is powerful and growing easier by the day. There is an assembler that could run other places and writing one is not the task that duplicating spin is.
(said assembler could easily output the little bit of SPIN to get things started too.)
Rev 2 of the prop will very likely be self hosting. If this is the case, interacting it would be OS independant. (terminal, etc...)
One other thing: I'll bet we can nail down that undocumented serial bit. Given this, WINE will work nicely going forward. This is likely less work than alternative OS support.
Support scales poorly. I support Parallax in their current dev path.
If we can run the compiler under WINE, there already is a loader that works in Python. Any decent IDE (like XCode for the MacOS or any of several for Linux) can do the scripting to run WINE and the compiler or the Python loader. There is a cross platform assembler already that mostly works that can also be used.