From: Matthew PATTISON <mfp@...>
Date: 2001-02-21T09:49:31+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:11200] Re: Fw: Re: [agenda-dev] Python

I have just recently acquired a PDA that runs linux, the Agenda VR3.
It runs a MIPS based NEC chip, the VR4181 I think. It is still in
developer version, and lots of people are writing open-source linux
PDA applications for it, using FLTK as the default GUI toolkit.
The default scripting language for the device has not been decided yet, 
although Python & Ruby seem to be the main 2 contenders. 

I would like to try to encourage the use of Ruby as the default, but I 
don't know if anyone has actually successfully compiled ruby for the 
device. The main advantages of ruby I think seem to be smaller interpreter 
size & smaller FLTK bindings (I don't think Ruby's FLTK bindings use SWIG
- somebody correct me) Python's FLTK bindings are more mature though,
it seems, and more people seem to know Python than Ruby. 

Sorry about the longish unsnipped discussion below, but I didn't know how 
else to get across the context of the discussion they've been having. If
anyone has any tips about compiling ruby for strange MIPS chips or reducing
the size of the interpreter or libraries James Fenn (email below) would
probably be a good person to get in contact with, or alternatively, if
people don't mind, mail them to the list or mail them to me & I'll pass 
them on.

* James Fenn (jfenn@uklinux.net) [010221 01:17]:
> 
> On Tue, 20 Feb 2001 06:48:42 -0500
> "Jay Carlson" <nop@nop.com> wrote:
> 
> > Cam writes:
> > 
> > > vsergeev wrote:
> > > >
> > > >     Back some months I heard people talking about either Python
> > > or perl on
> > > > agenda, can anybody tell me how to compile and where to get these?
> > 
> > With the config.site that's floating around, you should be able to compile
> > Python (at least v1.5.2) painlessly.  With close attention to what modules
> > are compiled in, you should be able to slim it down substantially.
> > 
> > > I'm not sure about these, Perl might be a bit big (as much as I
> > > love Perl). Python might be smaller.
> > >
> > > Another option is Ruby, I have been hearing good things about it
> > > and I note that it has a fltk binding in development. I think
> > > it is comparable in size to Python and comparable in functionality
> > > to Perl :-)
> > 
> > One of my other PDA projects is Squeak, an Open Source implementation of
> > Smalltalk.  So it's no surprise I'm starting to get interested in Ruby.
> > 
> > At first glance, Ruby looked a larger than Python, and I didn't see obvious
> > ways to smush it.  I'll have to revisit later, although somebody else could
> > take the lead on it.
> 
> I had a go at ruby, managed to compile it, but it just segfaults on my agenda and I'm not too sure where the problem is coming from. Any help would be appreciated.
> I have also written a little script that 'smushes' the natively written ruby libraries into a gz.tar file (tar.gz is better for compression but needs to be completely gunzipped before a single file can be extracted, when you have to do this several times, it really slows down the works) and extracts them whenever they are needed. 
> Ruby with all of the relevant c libraries compiled in (minus ncurses module, tk module, etc) is around 700k on my i386 box and the native libs when compresed about 200k - This is for fully featured ruby. Without any bells and whistles, it's about 520k. But the bells and whistles are nice :)
> 
> James Fenn
> 
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Matt Pattison