sparcalarms, was Re: [rescue] Perverse Question

[N.Miller]

On Tuesday, June 10, 2003, at 03:51 PM, Eric Josephson wrote:

> I'm aware of the history of java and what it was supposedly
> designed for.  But being (or having been) an embedded developer
> myself, the idea apalls me.  Ick.  And you folks complain about
> bloat in your desktop OS?  Sun can't even implement java efficiently
> on their workstations.

Sounds like the vague hand-wavings I heard when working at the large 
game company.  They had contracted with a certain hurtling network 
juggernaut to write a TCP/IP stack for their game console (they had 
one, but they wanted a better one).  When it arrived and the console 
engineer who was the network guru started examining, he discovered that 
it had a 6MB footprint in the development console.  Of course, it 
presented a serious difficulty--the dev consoles have 8MB of I/O memory 
(well, one of them, there are actually two kinds of dev consoles)--the 
consumer models have only 2MB of I/O memory.

So you can imagine their response when someone suggested that they 
implement Java and in web browser that was contemplated.

OTOH, Java runs on cell phones, so obviously there is some kind of 
subset that it can be cut back to.  Or perhaps Sun has hired some 
software developers who understand assembler for some platforms?

=Nadine=