From: Brian Candler <B.Candler@...>
Date: 2003-07-12T17:51:37+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby on an embedded ARM processor

On Sat, Jul 12, 2003 at 09:53:27AM +0900, Ben Giddings wrote:
> I'm doing embedded linux development, and while a lot of the code I write has 
> to be in C, I'd really like to be able to run my favourite language on the 
> device.  So two questions:
> 
> 1) Has anybody ported Ruby to an ARM (or ideally Intel XScale) processor?

Since you're developing in C, presumably you have a cross-compiler? Why not
just try firing it up on the Ruby source.

If your run-time environment is reasonably POSIX-compliant, and your compile
environment has a POSIX shell (to run ./configure) and an ANSI compiler, you
may be in luck.

> 2) Is there a trimmed-down distribution that could fit in under 5MB?

On my FreeBSD box, /usr/local/bin/ruby [version 1.6.8] is 1.4MB, and
/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.6 is 3.6MB [of which 2.1MB is libruby.a, which you can
drop if you don't want to embed Ruby in other C apps]. So unless the ARM
machine-code is much more bloated than the i386, you should easily get a
full Ruby distribution in around 3MB.

Cheers,

Brian.