home .. forth .. colorforth mail list archive ..

[colorforth] distributed colorforth?


Hey all I have a simple scenario that some colorforth programmers may have some insight towards.

I am currently trying to evaluate colorforth for a personal project involving some embedded work. While the project will eventually run on something other than x86, I have been -fighting- playing with colorforth on the PC to replicate the software environment of the end device.

The control panel in question is a dual screen touch input device roughly the size of a typical paperback novel, the hardware is readily available off the shelf dual PXA boards with wifi (802.11b/g) with 2GB microSD cards for storage. The current design has one processor per screen, and the communicate to each other over the network.

My vision for this thing is one part e-book, one part network console, one part fun hobby project. (although I've had some interest from medical device people and education especially now that the new OLPC design is public).

What I'm looking for is:

1.) A rough estimate of how much colorforth is currently x86 specific and will require porting 2.) A rough estimate of how many screens in colorforth it would be to write a basic 802.11b/g stack w/ support for UDP

My thinking is that if I can port colorforth, and get a basic wireless stack setup to the point where I can fire off UDP packets to a remote server then building the rest of the interface will be trivial in comparison. From a software standpoint, what I'd like to do is have a simple client server program written in colorforth that sends "forthlets" over UDP between the processors for evaluation. (these same forthlets can be fired off to any number of colorforth servers
on the net for processing that can't be handled locally)

The other language that I'm evaluating for this project is Erlang, which has the basic client server messaging model built into the language, but I don't care for the huge amount of overhead the full OTP + Linux solution would place upon the device.

It seems to me in the world of multiple processors, and distributed applications, Forth (and Object Oriented Forths) would be
the ideal fit.  Any ideas?

Dave

PS. Yes I would love to get my hands on a nice multiprocessor chip that would work as a CPU/DSP combo. I've got a Xilinx Virtex4 eval board that I've been planning on prototyping such a beast on, but I don't think I'll ever have enough time to
do it.


Email: dave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: colorforth-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
For additional commands, e-mail: colorforth-help@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Main web page - http://www.colorforth.com