• Perl 5.8.5 on my machine: about 60mb with HUNDREDS of extra modules.
• Visual C++: oh about 300mb
• Application, 2K lines Perl/Tk with modules: PerlApp packaged exe is 4mb
• Application, smaller, one GUI screen in C++: exe is around 27mb.

J2ME may be great for cell phones but where is the mainstream support? Or even the mainstream product? Oh, it's Java! Java small? Please pull the other leg!!!

Memory in any form is now cheap. Routinely I use 386ex or similar embedded modules with 512MB of Flash storage and 512MB of RAM. Not a single spinning spindle in site and usually we run Linux with Apache/Perl/MySQL on them! I currently have a robot here in my workshop. It has a 386ex, 512MB/512MB with USB, I can plug lots of USB HDD or Flash if I need it. It has 802.11b WiFi so it can join the network and it has about 18 slave processors (Arm 7's and Atmel Atmega128's) controlling motors, attitude stabilisation, sensors, GPS, small space laser collision avoidance and ultrasonic collision avoidance. All the slaves are written in 'C', the main controller dispatcher is all in Perl! It is quite fast enough and we can change things very quickly adn easily - in fact during operation! We log on to the controller over the WiFi, make code changes and re-boot the controller code with barely a noticeable heart-beat. Now, please tell me I can do that in Java?

jdtoronto

of course you could do all that with java or ???

more specifically what i mean is having a perl interpretter on a cell phone to run perl based applications on a cell phone//pda etc without leaving the pda/cellphone

im not sure if thats what your saying from above it sounds like you have a server somewhere you connect to via your pda/cellphone web browsing app?

when i speak of convergence i speak of it in terms of hardware such as in this article on convergence

drfrog

The Business Week article you cite is, as usual with the mass media, some years behind the times. They only become interested in something when the "big boys" comeout to play.

Convergence has been happening, not just in peoples dreams for years. Whilst the original proposals for a cellular phone system we floated in 1947 it wasn't until 1975 that Motorola filed for some patents and in 1977 AT&T had the first working system _in the USA_ functioning. But other researchers had working experimental systems in place in 1972 - they just got beaten to the punch by the Motorola behemoth. We had working cordless phones in 1969 - in the labs anyway. But none of the marketing guru's gave them a snow flakes chance in Hades of success until the 1980's. Well I recall being able to go to the 'loo' in 1973 with my cordless and elicit a shocked silence when I confirmed to the dis-believer on the other end of the conversation my location - as I flushed! In 1997 I wired a house with Cat-5 cable and piped ethernet from MP3 downloaders in various rooms back to a central server. I was told I was nuts. In 1987 I suspect that Karlheinz Brandenburg (co-inventor of MP3) was told he was a lunatic for thinking that people needed a compression system like that. Darn it, a lot of folk weren't even using CD's then!

If you want to see an MP3/WiFi boom-box there was one working at a home in Australia in 1995. A colleague and I used some early 802.11 technology (from Harris as I recall, or maybe we ended up with Zilog), a 386 based CPU module running a DOS type system and with everything written in Borland Turbo/C 4.5 as I recall. We built it so that we could play music on his HiFi system in the living room and we could hear it wherever we were in the lab at his place, or in our main facility 300 metres away.

I am sure others could tell you some stories of similar vein. I have spent nearly 30 years at the bleeding edge of technology - especially designing the hardware that makes it all work. Convergence has been here for years. It is just becoming sexy to talk about it now because it is affordable and the big boys can go and play.

Me? I am happilly enjoying my WiFi headset radio that can tune in to broadcasters in Australia (my place of origin), the UK, US, Belgium and Canada as I wander about the neighbourhood. All called up at will from a streaming server in my office on the second floor of the house. Right now on the bench in my basement is a small screen LCD display on the back end of an 802.11g WiFi system that sends streaming video. I have a video capture card in a computer in the UK right now which relays the video to me here in Canada. My hope is to be able to watch the cricket without a 'tether' this year. Hopefully it will all be working in time for the Boxing Day test from Australia!

Oh, and not a PDA or Blackberry in sight and my cell phone is about a 4 year old Nokia with nothing.

Compared to the footprint of some of the systems the software Gods have tried to interest me in - Perl is a lightweight!

jdtoronto

Of course, that's just my two cents.

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Exactly etcshadow,

Given that we can now put a CPU of Pentium class into a single FPGA device with a megabyte of RAM in the same chip and hang a 386ex class CPU off the side as "a low speed co-processor and controller" then we have something serious. The FPGA is 33mm square (in a 1020 pin BGA package) so in the same space we can put near a gigabyte of Flash memory and a gigabyte of RAM takes only that much space again. Our development has been with DOS and C on this type of platform for some years now - it has served us well, but we alredy have some embedded Linux prototypes in the lab that could end up being small enough to fit in a Blackberry! Who needs to worry about footprint, really, lets just use what makes the job easiest.

jdtoronto

Light foot print? Perhaps you mean light relative to the amount of memory they've been sticking on smaller and smaller chunks or real stuff.

There is already a miniperl and a microperl, which I guess would be the Perl equivalents of J2ME (where the "M" is micro: don't be deceived, it's not just regular Java on a phone). Each is a stripped down version and misses various libraries. It's only the distribution size of perl that's huge. Compile that puppy, strip out the modules you don't want, and perhaps compress some things and you have a decently sized distro.