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Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

Given all the efforts to cram Visual Studio Code onto the Pi (because kids learning the basics of programming need a "modern" development environment), an 8 GiB Pi would actually make that practical.

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I just fired up VS Code and it looks like it's using around 300MB. No doubt that's a lot, and it will go up as I actually use it, bit I'd still think you could get by with with much less than 8GB.

That'll grow fast when you also have chrome/ff, node, and rsync running right behind it. It can be done on 4GB, but its a lot more comfortable on 8.

I cross-compile to ARM all day long. The idea of editing and building on the target completely eludes me. I guess I shouldn't worry - it's job security.

Recently I tried to cross-compile a Qt application. With differences in the moc executable between host (x86 debian) and target (rpi3), I couldn't quite get things to work (with cmake as build system).

Do you have any tips?

moc is run at compile, and it runs on the host. You shouldn't need to run it on the target.

I'd get a complete toolchain from ARM's developer website, then build the entire Qt project for cross compilation on the host. Then you should be able to build the complete Qt app on x86 and deploy on ARM.

Not everybody uses the Pi for IoT. It was originally intended to be a child's primary computer and an educational tool. Being able to do useful programming work on the Pi itself is an important use case.

Then why wasn't that ready with version 1?

You're correct that it was originally an edu tool. It isn't anymore.

It still is, albeit that's not its only use. Your assumption that no one should ever need to write or compile code on the Pi is wrong on its face.

Ive always thought getting kids to write code on the prior generations of Pi was the fastest way to turn them off programming. Kids aren’t stupid, they can tell the computer is horrifically slow and not much fun to use as a desktop computer.

It’s a truly terrible development desktop machine. It’s great fun for deploying the projects you built on a even vaguely modern other computer that doesn’t lag just dragging an IDE window around, but I sure as heck wouldn’t want to actually develop the code on it.

I’m curious to see if the extra power offered by the 4 meaningfully changes this, but I don’t think it’s going to change my own habits.

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