On Thursday 01 August 2002 12:48 pm, Gavin Sinclair wrote:
> Good point.  Controlling these suckers using Ruby would be much
> better than any conceivable alternative.

But it's not going to happen any time soon; Ruby's footprint is much 
too large.

Even Lua, which is promoted as being a small embedding language, has a 
77K interpreter on my system. Even after one removed the Unix-isms 
(File I/O, process control, etc.) I suspect that it would still be > 
50K. Which is more ROM than most processors have available.

So people end up using cross-compiled native code (C, Asm, etc.) or 
tiny interpreters like Forth instead.

Now if we could come up with a Ruby interpreter that would fit in 32K, 
run programs from ROM, and require very little RAM, you'd have quite 
a large embedded market (though people would whine about the 32K).

-- 
Ned Konz
http://bike-nomad.com
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