On Thursday 12 September 2002 02:17 pm, Travis Griggs wrote:
> 8K is, well, small. I'm just not seeing it happen with Smalltalk,
> even Wisp. The 'size' of the Wisp VM (built for x86linux) is 27026
> bytes. There's probably still some Palm related stuff we haven't
> hunted down and removed which will make it smaller, but we also
> plan to add primitives for socket support and that will undoubtedly
> offset that. An unstripped version of the image is about 10K.

Though for many embedded projects (probably including this robot), 
both file and socket I/O is irrelevant. After all, most small 
embedded projects don't have an OS and so don't have files or 
sockets.

I'd just as soon have the memory back.

Of course, having i2c, SPI, serial, EEPROM, Flash, and other routines 
is a must for many smaller systems. But these can be loaded as 
libraries if you do register and bit access properly.

Processes are not absolutely essential; I find that state machines are 
more useful for small systems. And these can be done entirely in 
Smalltalk.

One missing part, though, is interrupt handling. A small system that 
can't handle interrupts is often useless for any but very simple 
"toy" programs.

-- 
Ned Konz
http://bike-nomad.com
GPG key ID: BEEA7EFE