Re: [open-cobol-list] OC on bare metal, foresee any major issues?

[Patrick]

Hi Bernard, Hello Vince, Hi Fred

Thanks for your feedback !

I just wanted to clarify my post. When I say bare metal, I mean no 
operating system what-so-ever.

Here is a project I like, that runs Lua on baremetal:
http://www.eluaproject.net/

My interest is with scientific instruments but wristwatches, microwaves 
etc are likely the same. Code is executing self-hosted.

So in the the regular situation a bit of ASM bootstraps C. The 
programmer may link in libraries to provide a file system but they may not.

Open Cobol would be so much easier(and fun) then writing everything in 
C. I know I would have to bootstrap with ASM and the libraries to 
provide OS like functionality would be in C but all that work could be 
reused across many projects and the rest of the project would go so much 
faster.

So cobc's dependencies should not matter, only libcob. There appear to 
be 23 of them.

These don't appear like they will cause trouble:
curses.h, gmp.h, langinfo.h, ltdl.h, malloc.h, ncurses.h, pdcurses.h, 
setjmp.h, strings.h, sys/timeb.h, langinfo.h,


I just don't know about these ones:
codegen.h, db_185.h, disam.h, exception.def, system.def, vbisam.h


These are OS specific and shouldn't be mandatory:
windows.h, gettext.h

Dynamic linking shouldn't be needed without an OS:
dlfcn.h


These look worrisome
direct.h looks to be a c++ header to manipulate directories.
isam.h looks to be a header to manipulate databases, I might not want a 
database, although apparently sqlite can fit on a wristwatch. I hope 
they can be omitted.


This would be quite a lot of work and I am nervous it won't work at all. 
Does anyone have any tips that might make it easier?

Thanks-Patrick