charm website gone?

riscos-charm.yolasite.com gives a “site disabled” page. :-(

Is there a live site with docs anywhere?

Not that I’m aware of. There’s a general consensus (I think via Archive, but not confirmed) that Peter Nowasad died a couple of years ago, and no-one has continued Charm development.

It is a standard part of the RCI disc build “Develop” folder, and includes source etc (Charm was built in Charm) but I haven’t really explored it since the last update from Peter about 5 years past.

I believe that Peter originally wrote Charm in Motorola 68000 assembler, and later rewrote it in ARM assembler. I hugely admired his effort in carrying the Charm project through, but I thought it was misdirected, and told him so. He agreed, but said it had given him much pleasure.

Found it a bit slow to load but the archive.org version does eventually get there:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190128030448/http://riscos-charm.yolasite.com/

Don’t know how many of the links work etc. but it’s likely your only chance to view any of the old content.

yay for archive.org!

“misdirected” how, may I ask?

“misdirected” how, may I ask?

Writing it in assembler, perhaps?

misdirected

I wondered if anyone would take me up on this. What I meant was that for Charm to be useful to a wider group of people it should have been implemented with a different set of aims. Charm is very compact and independent – it does not need Basic or C, for example. But it might have been longer lasting if it had. It is written in a very modular fashion, but that modularity is wasted because it cannot use libraries or tools other than its own. By going for its own file formats, rather than say AOF or ELF, it doomed itself. I know it was Peter’s ambition to write all the tools, the linker, the compiler, etc, all in Charm itself. There is a good reason why lots of programming languages are crafted in C.

amazon.com still sells the ebook “Charm programming on the Raspberry Pi”.

I just grabbed it (<$10 us). It seems adequate.

Gavin: I tend to agree that one should use the system assembler/linker, but that can be a $$$ problem when the dev kit is a separate expensive package…

the system assembler/linker

You mean the Norcroft tools? Yes, it was sad that their use was held back by their price, limited though they were – no dynamic linking with the AOF format, for example. Still, it was an era before GNU.

There was talk of the Norcroft tools being made free to use. Does anyone know if there’s a timeline for that plan yet?

Hopefully we’ll get some news at next month’s show…