From: Ben Giddings <ben@...>
Date: 2003-07-13T06:18:24+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby on an embedded ARM processor

On Saturday, July 12, 2003, at 04:51  AM, Brian Candler wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 12, 2003 at 09:53:27AM +0900, Ben Giddings wrote:
> Since you're developing in C, presumably you have a cross-compiler? 
> Why not
> just try firing it up on the Ruby source.

I'll try that, I just wanted to know if anybody had already shown that 
cross-compiling to ARM would work.  In my recent experience, cross 
compiling can be dead easy, or a major headache, and I just wanted to 
know which end of the spectrum Ruby was on.

> 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.

My cross-compile environment is i386 Linux, my runtime environment is 
ARM-linux, so I should be ok there.

>> 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.

Ok, what does /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.6 contain?  Does it contain network 
classes?  Aside from the core classes that's the part I need.  If it 
does contain that, can I trim any of the other parts (Complex, OO 
classes, etc) out?

Ben