
Pixie Pi - jonnybgood
http://stuarth.github.io/pixie/pixie-pi
======
therealmocker
There doesn't seem to be a homebrew package for Pixie yet on OS X. I made a
quick Brewfile ([http://brew.sh](http://brew.sh)) but was bitten by pixie
needing to find its standard libraries in a specific location.

I should look again because the project looks like a way to use Clojure style
syntax for quick one off scripts instead of making an uberjar.

~~~
_halgari
It's pretty trivial to fix the default locations that Pixie looks for files.
Create an issue on our github page and I'll help you get it working.

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BFay
Cool, I wanted to use Clojure on the Raspberry Pi, but the startup time is
very slow, due more to loading the core Clojure libraries than the JVM.

It makes writing a Clojure web server really impractical on the Pi. I
considered using clojurescript for the server, but ended up just going back to
node for my project.

~~~
evilduck
I wouldn't get too excited just yet. Just built this on my RPi2 without JIT
and ran the hello world file in the example folder:

    
    
        ./examples/hello-world.pxi  24.33s user 0.40s system 99% cpu 24.797 total

~~~
_halgari
There's something pretty wrong with that example. Times from my RPi2:

time ./pixie-vm ./examples/hello-world.pxi Hello, World!

real 0m1.167s user 0m1.160s sys 0m0.000s

~~~
evilduck
No clue what was different but I started from scratch and now get

    
    
        ./pixie-vm ./examples/hello-world.pxi  1.01s user 0.00s system 98% cpu 1.021 total
    

Sorry for the negative report.

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rasur
In what way is this clojure inspired? (Just curious.. Does it need the JVM, or
is it a brackety/syntax thing?)

~~~
dorfsmay
Pixie (1) is a Clojure-like language that is written in rpython and is run via
pypy (python jit), the advantages being fast startups (Clojure compile some
libraries on startup which doesn't make it very suitable for writing CLI).
This particular article is about running Pixie on the Raspberry Pi, check the
Pixie language page to learn more about Pixie itself.

Pixie does not require the JVM.

> In what way is this clojure inspired? is it a brackety/syntax thing?

Have you looked at the article? It shows an example (that uses brackets and
indeed looks like Clojure/lisp syntax).

[1]: [https://github.com/pixie-lang/pixie](https://github.com/pixie-
lang/pixie)

~~~
rasur
> Have you looked at the article?

Well, yes briefly (it lead to the question by saying it was clojure inspired),
but I didn't have time to delve fully into the minutiae, as am at work and for
some reason they keep expecting me to do stuff /shrugs/

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acron0
This is interesting. I've had success in the past at running Hy [1] (a Lisp
running on Python) on a Raspberry Pi as well. This could be a nice, speedier
alternative, however you lose the Python ecosystem.

[1] [http://hylang.org](http://hylang.org)

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fit2rule
I want to do the same but with Lua. I think that would be a very nice
environment.

~~~
malkia
Then you should look no further than luajit ->
[http://luajit.org](http://luajit.org)

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rcarmo
I tried to get the JIT to work on ARM a couple of months back. Since the
author explicitly turned off the JIT, I suppose there's still work to be
done...

~~~
_halgari
The jit works, it's just that RPython's support for cross compilation is weak,
and it requires a fair amount of memory to compile.

The gist of it all is that compiling pixie with a JIT for ARM requires an ARM
machine with at least 1GB of RAM. I've gotten it to compile with a JIT on my
Raspberry Pi 2, but it's a bit tricky.

Once the interpreter is compiled it only takes about 10MB of ram to run, so my
long term goals are to release pre-built binaries.

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karmakaze
Clojure, Pi, FFI, oh my! (couldn't resist)

