Re: [Caml-list] OCaml on the Arduino (or similar)

[Goswin von Brederlow <goswin-v-b@web.de>]

On Sun, Jan 19, 2014 at 05:05:30PM +0100, Adrien Nader wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 19, 2014, Dario Teixeira wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > > Arch-Arm-Linux (e.g. for Raspberry Pi) also has OCaml-packages.
> > 
> > > 
> > > Regarding Arduino I don't know it.
> > > Possibly the hardware is too weak for running Linux?
> > 
> > Depends on which Arduino you are talking about.  The Uno
> > and most other common variants are based on a fairly puny
> > (by today's standards) Atmel 8-bit processor.  But there
> > are other more powerful Arduino boards (like the Due)
> > based on ARM Cortex-M processors.  There are ports of Linux
> > to some Cortex-M variants, but I don't know if these happen
> > to be the same as those used in the Arduino Due...
> > 
> > But anyway, if you need something powerful enough to run Linux,
> > you might also consider other boards like the Raspberry Pi or
> > the BeagleBone Black.  The latter in particular is a pretty
> > powerful device and has tons of GPIO pins.
> > 
> 
> You could run something like Mirage too. ;-) 
> 
> http://www.openmirage.org/
> 
> -- 
> Adrien Nader

Mirage though requires hardware virtualization, which means a quite
recent and powerfull arm board. The Raspberry Pi is way to old for
that (Note: the cpu is way older than what other boards have).

I've written an exokernel that lets me run ocaml barebone on the
Raspberry Pi:

    https://github.com/mrvn/ocaml-rpi

It's at a proof-of-concept stage. You can run simple code with output
on the serial console. The graphics gets initialized too but there is
no ocaml interface for it yet though. I've run into a problem that the
GC will crash after a while that I got stuck on.

The exokernel might be a good starting point for other boards (where
mirage doesn't run) too. You don't need much to get the ocaml runtime
running on some board.

For Arduino the hard part would be to gte ocaml itself build. I don't
think 16-bit values are supported.

MfG
	Goswin