I just read my post from last night.. it does sound more like a rant than I would have liked. Maybe I should avoid posting after midnight.
When the topic was first brought up, even some of the XMOS regulars believed the toochain was open. parts of it are, but the "XC" specific extensions are not.
If you're curious, you can read more
http://www.xcore.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=2137There are a few in the XMOS clan who prefer PowerPC processors, but the grand majority are there to play with the chips, and would prefer to just use the tools provided.
When I was bringing up the command line tools for AmigaOS, one of the snags I hit turned out to be missing clock configuration information in our compiled projects. The XMOS community (who are generally very capable with these things) had no idea what might be wrong. It turns out that all of the XMOS dev stuff is very thorough about autodetection and autoconfiguration without user intervention of any sort. Tools like this are convenient, but they do contribute to the end user knowing less about how things work. I finally worked it out with Seghers help, and the AmigaOS command line tools were modified to properly set the clock divider correctly. On the other end, I wrote up a config script specifically for Xena, and added it to the XDK, so when we go to start a project, "Amiga X1000_Xena" comes up as an option when selecting the target chip.
Of course, it's not shipped from XMOS that way, but it's (now) easy to add in.
More thoughts about Xena projects:
The ability to do VERY accurate time measurements would make it ideal for ultrasonic measurements.
It would also be VERY simple to make a IR Remote control recorder/playback programs, even better if you choose to support the Pronto format. This would allow loading/saving remotes from a large existing community..
Granted, neither of these is "the killer application", but both could be a lot of fun to play with. Honestly the Pronto project would be made SO simple with the programmable clocks in the Xena chip.
And about the compiler.. I have wondered a few times about "cloud processing" to help us out. I wonder how hard, or how expensive, it would be to set up a virtual machine hosted at some internet company.. and use it just for compiling Xena code for Amiga-folk. I have discussed similar ideas in the XMOS forums, and no objections were raised by the company. If it helps them expand the user base (or just shut me up) then it's good for everyone.
_somebody_ would need to pay some monthly fee for processor time used.. but I suspect the total CPU hours per month would be quite low.. it would certainly be worth looking in to, anyway.
This networking stuff is way over my skill set. I was proud to get ethernet working on my classic 4000, and have never looked deeper since then. I wonder if anyone in our community has the knowledge to discuss these options?
Back to work...