[Gcl-devel] Re: GCL on single board computer

[Andreas Yankopolus]

Camm,

Thanks for your response.

> For lisp applications built on top of GCL on platforms with native 
> object relocation, no GCL files need be installed. This includes ARM 
> and x86.  On platforms using dlopen, GCL itself must be installed only 
> if one wants to compile new system images -- only cmpinclude.h is 
> needed if one wants to compile only lisp object modules, and no files 
> are needed if one does not intend to use the compiler.

Perhaps I should have asked about the minimal files required to run 
compiled (.o) applications. Some sort of Lisp runtime (apparently 
contained in saved_gcl) seems necessary to for this, since compiling 
and running a Lisp application involves:

Compile:

% gcl -compile foo.lisp

Run:

% gcl -batch -load foo.o

Unless I'm missing something, which is likely the case, I haven't seen 
a way to create the equivalent of a statically linked version of foo.o. 
The file saved_gcl appears to serve as a sort of combination dynamic 
loader, linker, and libc for Lisp.

Cross-compiling on an x86 works great. The conversion of foo.lisp to 
foo.c doesn't appear to depend on the system architecture, and GCL 
calls arm-linux-gcc to compile foo.c to foo.o without a problem.

> You might be interested to know that .debs for GCL/arm are available 
> from the Debian repository.  I myself have used these to produce arm 
> .debs for axiom, so I know it can be done.  Tim Daly, the lead axiom 
> developer, wanted to run axiom on his pda at one point.

I initially didn't think this would work since the machines are running 
the Familiar distribution from handhelds.org. However, the .deb 
installed just fine. Unfortunately, it contains about 14 MB of stuff. 
I'm hoping that I can delete much of that. One option I'm considering 
is compiling GCL myself and passing args to ./configure to scale back 
on features, but it would be easier to just delete unneeded files :-)

Thanks,

Andreas