Just sharing something thats been circling my head for a while about a possible OpenSmalltalk based IoT platform.
Many micro-controllers support FreeRTOS https://www.freertos.org/RTOS_ports.html including the ARMv7 https://www.freertos.org/FreeRTOS_Features.html and the ESP32 (based on Cadence's Tensilica Xtensa LX6) https://www.espressif.com/en/media_overview/news/espressifs-esp32-support-am...
Of particular interest is Amazon's adoption of FreeRTOS and its change of license from GPLv2 to MIT. https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/announcing-freertos-kernel-v10/
If a "thing" is not doing graphics, then the StackInterpreter may be sufficient for many IoT applications. Having a FreeRTOS build target for the StackInterpreter might open the opportunity to have our Images running as the *only* application on a wide variety of embedded systems. A tight Edit-Compile-Run-Debug cycle using the TelePharo remote tools might be very compelling versus the usual Edit-Compile-Download-Boot-Run-BlindGuessDebug cycle.
I'd expect interest that starts with the hobby-maker community, might later extend into the lucrative industrial control market in competition with traditional PLCs.
Maybe getting the StackInterpreter running on a new platform could make a good advanced-student project?
For starters, there seems a simulator here (I haven't used it) https://www.freertos.org/FreeRTOS-simulator-for-Linux.html
which raises one question... I understand the VM has a problem with some simulators but is that more a problem for the JIT part of Cog than the StackInterpreter?
cheers -ben
Yes, this would be potentially very interesting. Small devices these days are so powerful they match fantasy engineering workstations of the early 90's. At least in principle it should be practical to run Squeak on an ARM SoC with 32Mb ram and anything better than 70MHz - hell, Eliot & I had the original ARM 1 at 4MHz and 4Mb ram running ST-80 in 1987, scoring near Dorado performance and it was *amazing*. A stackinterperet vm would be fine and easy to port (it's not like we lack experience at doing that) and you'd only need slightly bigger memory etc to make the Cog practical.
Craig has done lots of stuff around remote connecting and tiny images and building up what you need.
Find funding and go for it.
On 12-07-2018, at 4:35 AM, Ben Coman btc@openInWorld.com wrote:
Just sharing something thats been circling my head for a while about a possible OpenSmalltalk based IoT platform.
tim -- tim Rowledge; tim@rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim Diagnostics are the programs that run when nothing else will.
vm-dev@lists.squeakfoundation.org
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Ben Coman -
tim Rowledge