OLPC Inspires Open Source Projects 75
Don Marti writes "A loose network of developers representing many commonly used open source projects are working to develop a new generation of low-memory, efficient code. This targeted code is being designed for a system, of which only 500 prototype boards now exist:
the 'Children's Machine 1' from the One Laptop Per Child project." From the article: "Gettys says measuring existing performance has to come before trying those changes. 'We've been pulling in every decent performance tool Linux has so we can optimize when and where it really matters,' he says. A key automated testing tool is Tinderbox, a build and test management tool originally developed for Mozilla, that new OLPC developer Chris Ball has installed, to build and test OLPC software. And, after Red Hat kernel developer Dave Jones gave a standing-room-only talk at the 2006 Linux Symposium titled, Why Userspace Sucks (Or, 101 Really Dumb Things Your App Shouldn't Do), his reports of suckiness, which include kernel-based measurements of wasteful behavior, are helpful, Blizzard says."
27 clicks later (Score:3, Informative)
"Why user space sucks" is at:
Pages 441-449 of http://www.linuxsymposium.org/2006/linuxsymposium
Re:Blizzard? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:27 clicks later (Score:5, Informative)
Better download just the paper itself [redhat.com] instead of the full proceedings.
BTW, newsforge has a report about the presentation [newsforge.com] as well.
--
Ademar http://www.ademar.org/ [ademar.org]
Re:Forth (Score:3, Informative)
I'm not exactly sure where you get that impression from - certainly Forth can be pleasantly efficient when it comes to memory use, but I would suggest "roughly on par with C" is about the best you can claim. Now, while the Debian Computer Language Shootout benchmarks are hardly ideal, particularly since they are all very small programs, they can give at least an idea of roughly comparable memory use in a variety of different languages. In this case, glancing through a few [debian.org] different [debian.org] benchmarks [debian.org], we see that Forth certainly holds its own (doing quite well in the k-nucleotide benchmark) but is at best on par with the other memory efficient languages, and is down the list in several benhmarks. The winner is often C (unsurprisingly), though Pascal, D, Eiffel and Fortran all do remarkably well as well. Given those options, and presuming you were going to move away from C for some reason, I'd have to say D and Eiffel are the most attractive options.
why dont you try it first (Score:0, Informative)