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From: alanh@tekig4.TEK.COM (Al Hooton, the available sailing crew member)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.smalltalk
Subject: Smalltalk for (embedded) real-time systems?
Message-ID: <1881@tekig4.TEK.COM>
Date: Fri, 4-Sep-87 11:57:47 EDT
Article-I.D.: tekig4.1881
Posted: Fri Sep  4 11:57:47 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 5-Sep-87 22:46:54 EDT
Reply-To: alanh@tekig4.UUCP (Al Hooton, the available sailing crew member)
Organization: Tektronix, Inc., Beaverton, OR.
Lines: 31


	Since I've only recently gotten interested in Smalltalk, the
following question may already have been hashed to death in this
group.  If so, I'm sure someone will let me know, and I'll quietly go
crawl back under the sailboat I crawled out from.

	After attending a recent in-house smalltalk seminar, it seems
that the concensus on using smalltalk in real-time applications is it
IS possible (which I would not have previously believed).  The
following two approaches seemed most popular:

	- develop in smalltalk, the automatically/manually translate
	  to objective-C for run-time performance.

	- provide a smalltalk-to-C interface so that C routines can
	  look like smalltalk objects or lower-level primitives; then,
	  code all the time-critical stuff in C.

	Since the systems are embedded, and usually don't need all the
window management stuff when running in the intended application, the
images are 'cloned' to remove all the user-interface code.

	Which of these do YOU folks like?  Are there other ways that
are (better|worse|different|dumb|revolutionary)?  Any specific
considerations that might be shared by anyone who is doing this sort
of thing?

	Gee.... we might even get a neat discussion of this...

						Al Hooton
						...tektronix!tekig4!alanh