[luau] another interesting thing I found on another list

[Jimen Ching]

On Wed, 4 Dec 2002, Charles Lockhart wrote:
>was causing a bit of anger and disgust on another list, and I could
>pretty much see why.  This guy has 15 years of working experience with
>vxWorks, none with embedded Linux, or even with Linux in general as far
>as I could tell.

I have two comments that might fan the flames, but its just my opinion.

I noticed VxWorks people are a lot like Windows programmers.  Everything
is packaged so nice and tight for them, that they hardly have to think.
This is good, I guess, if you're concerned about time to market and have
limitless computer resources (i.e. memory, disk space, processing power,
etc).  But when you are talking about embedded systems, these are the very
things that are limited.  VxWorks has gotten to the point where it is the
Windows of the embedded world.  It is hardly surprising that a VxWorks
programmer has hard time with anything different.

My second comment concerns Linux and embedded systems.  At my new job, I
am now working with Linux on a single board computer (SBC).  These SBC's
have PII processors (1.2Ghz), 1Gig RAM, Gigabit Ethernet, etc.  I hardly
consider this an 'embedded' system.  Though we use this SBC for a very
specific purpose, I have a hard time convincing myself that I am working
on an embedded environment.  Of course, I have also worked on the
Microchip PIC17X processors.  This is an 8bit processor (10Mhz), with 906
bytes of RAM for data, 32K bytes of RAM for code.  The only communications
with it is via a serial port or a JTAG emulator.  Comparing these two
environments, its pretty clear which one is 'embedded'.

Every time I hear someone talk about 'embedded Linux', I just have to give
off a little chuckle.  ;-)

--jc
-- 
Jimen Ching (WH6BRR)      jching at flex.com     wh6brr at uhm.ampr.org