whatever happened to the ide?
ThePenguinMaster
Posts: 89
so whatever happened to the company making the c language for the propeller? are they still working on it? i thnk that has to be the only thing i dont like abu tthe propeller is the programming language. such an awesome chip held back by somehting like that.. its suchg a tease. for advanced programming, spin language really throws a wrench into the devolipment of a project.
Comments
Don't expect it to work miracles. The stated plan is for it to compile into what's been called the Large Memory Model instruction set which is a partially interpreted instruction set that's slower than directly executed instructions, but much faster than Spin. It's very expensive in terms of its memory requirement since these are still individual instructions and occupy 4 bytes. For "advanced programming" you may still do better with a combination of Spin and assembly language with Spin allowing much larger programs and the assembly language providing for speed and exact timing control. There are a couple of Forth implementations in process. These too will have their own advantages.
Ref:
http://forums.parallax.com/forums/default.aspx?f=25&m=206849&g=207156#m207156
Don't see why.
Graham
(b) There are no function pointers
(c) ..
(d) ..
(e) ..
(f) ..
(g) ..
#define VGA 1
// #define TV 1
#ifdef VGA
do something
#endif VGA
#ifdef TV
do something
#endif TV
Or #include for non-functions such as a config file but perhaps I missed that one.
The above would not change the SPIN language but would make programming a wee bit easier.
No beta yet, but we do have a preliminary code generator in house already. There are boatload of stuff to do, lest of which is the decision on the runtime architecture and the Large Memory Model! We are committed to the project though, so no worry.
This isn't a request for ImageCraft to implement external memory handling ( it'd be nice if you did ) but something to bear in mind while designing if you haven't considered it already.
Being able to generate larger than hub memory sized code, and a mechanism to bootload that additional code into additional Eeprom would probably be a great help, even if memory management and any paging were left for end users to code for.
1) the looping structure is controlled by tabbing
2) no real good way to do sdata types/ structures ect
3) no namespaces for your classes.
well i guess the thing that im thinking is how c is an object oriented programming language. i know mpLab is based off of C, and it is much easyier to make large programs without having to worry about flipping back to your modules because you forgot all the parameters for it. i do a lot of flipping back and forthe through screens and it gets distracting. im talking aobut big programs on multiple chips sort of thing. the spin compiler seems to be great for starting, and it really is! but there should be an alternative for more industrial things.
again, its a awesome chip! i love it! and i think its a great thing that imagecraft is doing. Yah i bet you guys have a lot to do! making a compiuler dosnt seem like an easy task!
Richard.............. No pressure though. [noparse]:)[/noparse]
Please keep in mind that C is not the same thing as C++. C is not an object-oriented programming language. There are no objects in C, no name spaces except through separate compilation. There are structures which is something Spin doesn't have (although you can make them, there's no support in the language) and C does have function pointers which is a very dangerous, but useful construct.
Unless some disaster befalls ImageCraft, there will be a C compiler for the Propeller available in the next couple of weeks. They had discussed having it by year's end at the latest and seem to be on track from their comments. It is almost November already.
Fred,
You might as well get used to the idea.
In addition (or should I say: subtraction?) It might miss some features which are hard to generate code for, or the run time system is not yet ready for , or a suitable run time system will not fit into the memory
Threads and other Unix-like features fall most likely into that category. As I understood there will also be many limitations to the linker...
But we will habe fun, doubtlessly..
Of course, as I keep on saying, (and prodding) Prop2 will solve the codespace problem.
The 'beauty' of 'Prop2' is appreciated many moons in advance. Thank you again Chip, for what we now know as 'Prop2'.
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Harley Shanko
How much will the compiler cost? I hope it will be free but suspect it will cost a fortune.