On Tue, Sep 16, 2014 at 1:48 PM, Thierry Goubier thierry.goubier@gmail.com wrote:

2014-09-16 13:14 GMT+02:00 Ben Coman btc@openinworld.com:

...

Don't worry/don't bother with thoses: you will never use Smalltalk or a

VM :) It will never be certified by authorities, and the industry will never accept it.

...

You are probably right for those two examples, but there are other

not-so-regulated domains where real-time is useful - e.g. industrial automation and robotics.

Real-time is usefull there, yes. But Smalltalk and Cog will never get

there. Except as a DSL / code generator tool (which means a MDE approach, more or less).

(And code generation is where Pharo to C or LLVM-IR gets us interested)

Dynamic optimisations, lack of static typing: they will laugh you out in

any of those fields.

Even if their developpers use Python behind their back.

http://www.altreonic.com/ has OpenComRTOSwhich looks the kind of thing we would like to target then.

I know the creator of OpenCOMRTOS, in fact, he lives close to my place.

http://www.altreonic.com/sites/default/files/Altreonic%20OpenComRTOS2013.pdf

They happen to have a "VM" http://www.altreonic.com/sites/default/files/Altreonic%20Safe%20Virtual%20Ma...

"The ultra small target independent Virtual Machine"

Applications:  Remote diagnostics.  Fail safe and fault tolerant control.  Processor independent programming. Thanks to the use of OpenComRTOS, SafeVM tasks can operate system wide across all nodes in the network. The user can also put several SafeVM tasks on the same node. The natively running OpenComRTOS itself acts as a virtual machine for the SVM tasks, isolating them from the underlying hardware details while providing full access. Safe Virtual Machine for C

So, looks like we aren't in such a black and white situation.

Phil

Thierry