Muckin About

Another day hacking around inside - too lazy/warm to do the yard, and mum was down anyway, so was socialising during the morning. Hacking is more interesting anyway.

Kept poking around with the FORTH code, and managed to fix a couple more things. Silly mistakes like using the jonesforth versions of words rather than the (standard) ones I wrote. Got a rough POSTPONE implemented, but only for non-immediate words. And now, der, i've got a nice chicken and egg since I need it to implement IF (the way i'm doing it) and I need IF to implement POSTPONE properly. Ahh well; just have do it in ASM instead I guess, it's only trivial anyway. So I finally started filling out the higher level words, although not terribly quickly. Need to work out how to bootstrap it too ... ideally I would use a cross-compiler to generate everything into a memory image, but as the code compilation process itself extends the compiler, it makes things a bit more `interesting'. I'll think about whether that's worth worrying about (almost certainly not with this toy implementation), but to start with I guess i'll just compile it as part of the booting process on the target host.

Had a go over of the weekend at trying to get AI-OS (from the Touch Book) to work on the beagleboard, but unfortunately it looks like it no longer works on this hardware. Or I just did something wrong - i'm using a HDD since I don't have a big enough SD card and there's definitely stuff that hardcodes the SD slot. I finally got it to start booting using an Angstrom kernel, ... and then minicom crashed during the boot-up process, so I don't know why it hung - or even if it did at all, but after a few minutes I hit the reset button. And now when I try to boot the kernel just crashes with a NULL pointer, so it must've upset something on the SD card in the process. Ahh well it wasn't like I was expecting much ...

Also read a bit about Google's Go language. I can't remember if i'd heard about it before (maybe I have?), but I never looked too closely until now. Hmm, sounds fairly interesting ... might have to play with that next.

And today I also had another go looking at the ARM port of Haiku. Finally! The compiler builds! No more obscure error which makes no sense! Well that's a pretty good start anyway. Managed to get it to build (with a small fix for a renamed type), but am still working out the disk image building and Das U-Boot stuff so that's as far as i've gotten so far.