[ECOS] python?

[Shannon Holland]

On Sunday, March 9, 2003, at 06:14  AM, Gary Thomas wrote:

> I have done this in the past (and actually, I'm playing with the
> latest Python on eCos at the moment).  It's a non-trivial experience.
> As mentioned previously, Python is very file oriented, so you need
> a file system of some sort.  It's also not small - the version I've
> been experimenting with is pretty big (which means ethernet downloading
> is pretty much a necessity):
> [gthomas@hermes Python-2.3a2]$ powerpc-eabi-size python
>    text    data     bss     dec     hex filename
> 1244460 1576988  701564 3523012  35c1c4 python
>
> What sort of "prototyping" did you have in mind?
> What kind of functionality were you expecting to utilize?
>
> BTW - I sent this reply using Python running on an embedded PowerPC
> system running eCos :-)
>

I was planning to get a compact flash card and use that for the OS file 
system - figured these things would get rather large plus it's a lot 
faster for copying lots of stuff. The board has ethernet as well, so 
that will be useful once I get it all going.

What sort of things did you have to do to python? Were they general to 
ecos or more specific to your environment?

I'm basically working on a fairly complicated data analysis application 
along with user interface. I was looking for something that had good 
existing libraries for numerical analysis, gui frameworks as well as 
just an abundance of basic data structures. These things all exist in 
C, but I also wanted a language which is suited towards getting things 
going quickly as well as being easy to make larger changes (something 
where C or C++ isn't so great in my experience - don't want to start a 
language flame-war though!). Python or java would work well for this, 
python looks to be more flexible and is very easy to extend with native 
code so I've been leaning in that direction (I've done lots of Java 
programming but not too much python yet).

I also wanted an environment where I could do a lot of development on 
my OS X laptop and then easily move it over to the target environment. 
In the past I've always structured my code so that I can compile and 
run both in a simulator and a target environment, but an emulated 
language would work very well here as well.

Shannon


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