Ahoy,
Interfacing with hardware is the responsibility of the operating system. With Linux and Android the base op sys is the Linux kernel. Everything else is window dressing and the reality of needed to communicate with the kernel. In the Wintel world each part of the hardware is usually separate from the CPU. In the Arm world the SOC (System-On-a-Chip) is most of the computer system hardware. Even so in Linux, Android and Windows drivers are used to allow each piece of hardware to communicate with the kernel.
What Uli has done is write a programming language as an interface directly to an op sys which he also wrote. This is a huge job even just concentrating on one SOC. It is much easier with something like Basic-256 which links to the Linux OS. He wrote bare-metal code to boot then interface with the SOC & hardware and have a way to program it. Trying to do this for each SOC would be an impossible task for one person or even a small group of people. Look at how many people work to port Linux or even Emuelec to many SOCs.
What originally attracted me to EB NG was the simplicity of applying power and starting to program in a few seconds on inexpensive computer boards. As far as an upgrade path I'd lean toward sticking with the Allwinner SOC family, perhaps the H6. But I think the inexpensive H3 will be around for a while longer.
Almost since building computers began a universal seamlessly portable op sys and programming language has been the Holy Grail, as sought after as the "theory of everything" in physics. I don't see it happening anytime soon. And wouldn't it be boring then ayway?
daveyb
Happy holidays all!
