Re: What about Embedded?

["Sean Kelley" <sean sweng gmail com>]

Hello,

On 7/20/06, Miguel de Icaza <miguel ximian com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> > Indeed, I find it ironic that in light of recent moves to expand the
> > Gnome tent to include Mobile and Embedded devices as at GUADEC this
> > year, that there is at the same time an effort to push MONO into the
> > stack.  At what price are these moves being made or considered?  Like
> > Havoc said, innovation at the cost of performance and memory usage is
> > not innovation in my book.
>
> Mono works just fine on embedded devices, and considering that it
> consumes less memory than Python when running Gtk applications and
> people do not have a problem using Python on embedded devices I do not
> see the problem.
>
> Miguel.

I look forward to Mono development over time.  I do think it is an
exciting framework.  My experience is from the embedded world.  My
engineers don't use Python with Gtk+.  We use Gtk+ and Gtkmm.  My
concern is for the overall user experience.  I come from a world of
our own in-house kernel and rootstrap.  My kernel is written in ARM
assembly.  All of my drivers from I2C to USB are written in ARM
assembly. So as I transition my team's products to the Gnu/Linux and
Gnome platform, the overall user experience should not regress.  That
is my gatekeeper in a way.

You have to weigh the pros and cons of cost as well.  Do I throw more
money at more expensive processors, more memory, and more flash just
so that software performance doesn't regress?  Or do I compromize and
stick with native for now, keep the price down and allow third party
use of frameworks like Mono or Python and see it evolve over time.
That is my balance.  I think it is a fair one.

Sean