[swift-users] [swift-dev] Cross Compiling Swift for Bare Metal?

[Jens Alfke]

> On Dec 20, 2015, at 3:03 PM, William Dillon via swift-users <swift-users at swift.org> wrote:
> 
> Though it might sound a little silly (because why not run linux), but starting with a beagle bone black would not be a terrible way to begin with bare metal work.  It has plenty of RAM, you know that LLVM writes good machine code for it, it has JTAG accessible, it’s inexpensive, etc...

I never thought I’d say this, but $50 seems kind of expensive for a computer :) The specs look like the Raspberry Pi 2 which is closer to $30. Me, I’m waiting for my $9 C.H.I.P. (similar specs) that I Kickstarted to arrive :)

Writing a kernel would be awesome. I’ve been reading Operating Systems Design And Implementation, “the MINIX book”, which is a pretty clear introduction to Unix-like OSs, but of course the kernel source code it walks through is a mix of C and x86 asm, and worse, it’s ten years behind the current MINIX3 kernel sourcebase. But it could be rewritten in Swift… :) And the great thing is that if you got the kernel running, you could then drop the whole rest of MINIX on top of it and instantly have a working BSD-like UNIX with a shell, filesystem, networking…

—Jens
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