Questions about low level programming.

["Diego Jacobi" <jacobidiego gmail com>]

Hello.

I am not sure if the subject for this mail is correct.

I am an electronic engineering student. I have used glib and gtk mostly through python.
This year i have to do some kind of projects with very low end devices. Those device are mostly programmed in assembler and or C/C++.
Just to say some of this devices are 8085, 8086, freescale(motorola) microcontrollers, etc.
We have to use them to manually build a computer model and this includes programming an OS to accomplish certain tasks. Of course, it wont be a linux, and it wont fit inside those roms.

But i was thinking on the possibility to use glib to make it much easier to build this OS and handle whatever data is required by the electronic project.

One of the questions of this mail, is to ask if glib can be compiled for a 8 bit device, like 8085 is or 8086 (x86 arch) or a microcontroller, and if unneeded parts of glib can be disabled on compile time, like gio.
Also glib is used as an external lib and i think that this OS should be a monolitic file, then glib will have to be inside the little compiled OS.

To program this OS i can actually make use of some standard libs, like include "math.h" and others, but there are no complex OS-respective routines to handle things like time. Can Glib be compiled with no OS-specific functions and only the standard ones.

I expect to be able to used things like MainLoop, idle_add, timeout_add, basic ansi string manipulation, lists, encoding to communicate with a PC, etc. to replace harder tasks.
If i need a rutine to turn on a pin or to write a word to a port sincronously (like turn on/off a LED every 2 seconds) i have to take into account the amount of clocks in the routine wasting a lot of processing time doing lots of sleep(..), if i use timeout_add it will be much more efficient. But in some cases an sleep like routine is required on this kind of processes, i dont know why there isnt one on glib to be able to do a sleep and pause a function execution but continue doing MainLoop stuff and not break the event system.

It will be very cool if i can use GLib in this kind of devices, will make it very easy and efficient. Or maybe only a part of glib.

Cheers.
Diego Jacobi