in reply to perl and the age/art of convergence

My take on the whole "convergence" thing is actually the opposite: that the limitted powers of "embedded" devices will soon go away, as they become more and more full-fledged computing devices. Add to that the fact that computers keep getting faster and more powerful and programmers keep not... and you'll see bigger, fatter, more developer-friendly environments (like perl) running on everything.

Of course, that's just my two cents.

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Re^2: perl and the age/art of convergence
by jdtoronto (Prior) on Oct 23, 2004 at 03:30 UTC
    Exactly etcshadow,

    Given that we can now put a CPU of Pentium class into a single FPGA device with a megabyte of RAM in the same chip and hang a 386ex class CPU off the side as "a low speed co-processor and controller" then we have something serious. The FPGA is 33mm square (in a 1020 pin BGA package) so in the same space we can put near a gigabyte of Flash memory and a gigabyte of RAM takes only that much space again. Our development has been with DOS and C on this type of platform for some years now - it has served us well, but we alredy have some embedded Linux prototypes in the lab that could end up being small enough to fit in a Blackberry! Who needs to worry about footprint, really, lets just use what makes the job easiest.

    jdtoronto