[colorforth] distributed colorforth?

["David J. Goehrig" <dave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hey all I have a simple scenario that some colorforth programmers may 
have some insight towards.

I am currently trying to evaluate colorforth for a personal project 
involving some embedded work.  While
the project will eventually run on something other than x86, I have been 
-fighting- playing with
colorforth on the PC to replicate the software environment of the end 
device.

The control panel in question is a dual screen touch input device 
roughly the size of a typical paperback novel,
the hardware is readily available off the shelf dual PXA boards with 
wifi (802.11b/g) with 2GB microSD cards
for storage.  The current design has one processor per screen, and the 
communicate to each other over the network.

My vision for this thing is one part e-book, one part network console, 
one part fun hobby project.  (although I've had some interest from 
medical device people and education especially now that the new OLPC 
design is public).

What I'm looking for is:

1.) A rough estimate of how much colorforth is currently x86 specific 
and will require porting
2.) A rough estimate of how many screens in colorforth it would be to 
write a basic 802.11b/g stack w/ support for UDP

My thinking is that if I can port colorforth, and get a basic wireless 
stack setup to the point where I can fire off UDP
packets to a remote server then building the rest of the interface will 
be trivial in comparison.  From a software
standpoint, what I'd like to do is have a simple client server program 
written in colorforth that sends "forthlets" over
UDP between the processors for evaluation. (these same forthlets can be 
fired off to any number of colorforth servers
on the net for processing that can't be handled locally)

The other language that I'm evaluating for this project is Erlang, which 
has the basic client server messaging model built
into the language, but I don't care for the huge amount of overhead the 
full OTP + Linux solution would place upon the device.

It seems to me in the world of multiple processors, and distributed 
applications, Forth (and Object Oriented Forths) would be
the ideal fit.  Any ideas?

Dave

PS. Yes I would love to get my hands on a nice multiprocessor chip that 
would work as a CPU/DSP combo.  I've got a Xilinx
Virtex4 eval board that I've been planning on prototyping such a beast 
on, but I don't think I'll ever have enough time to
do it.


Email: dave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

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