[racket] Revisiting Racket on ARM

On 11/15/2011 01:35 PM, Deren Dohoda wrote:
> It looks like everything is moving ahead fine for the Raspberry Pi, a
> ridiculously inexpensive single-board computer based on ARM. The
> mailing list here doesn't have a lot of discussion on ARM except as it
> related to things like tablets. While it might be fun to tinker on my
> phone with Racket, I could actually find better use for it on
> something like this in a very soft-time embedded situation.
>
> http://www.raspberrypi.org/
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_pi
>
> Current plans include a Debian distribution, and a few others. What is
> the feasibility of getting Racket up here? What if GUI features were
> not included, would that help? I suddenly have dreams of a super cheap
> SBC running my racket applications on init...

Racket is already packaged by Debian on ARM. There is no current JIT 
support for ARM though, so things will be slower than they might 
otherwise be.

Be wary of the "ultra cheap" part as well - by the time you add a power 
supply, case, WiFi card (if necessary), and storage you may be nearing 
the cost of the more powerful Cortex-A8 based Efika MX Smarttop. With 
512MB of RAM instead of 256MB on the Raspberry Pi board, it should 
provide a more pleasant Racket experience.

-- 
Brian Mastenbrook
brian at mastenbrook.net
http://brian.mastenbrook.net/