Re: what kind of non microconroller app are done in forth?

jennifer.spykerman@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 wrote:
....
> It looks like WAY WAY too much work to write device drivers etc... I
> mean, look every PC's gonna be different, you're gonna have one with
> this network card, that GFX card etc, mmmm... PCI bus...mmm... USB...
> Sounds like a royal pain. How you gonna cover all the devices people
> are reasonably expected to have? Even writing drivers for just the
> stuff you own yourself's gonna be a right pain.

Writing drivers is vastly overrated as far as difficulty is concerned. 
It is waaay easier to write drivers than to interface to an OS (any OS). 
  For many years FORTH, Inc. sup****ted fully native implementations on 
PCs and various microprocessor "development systems".  We abandoned 
sup****ting a native Forth on PCs because the utility of being able to 
run other apps with minimal fuss under DOS and later Windows was more 
valuable, not only to us but to our customers.

The problem isn't individual drivers, which (in a native Forth) take 
somewhere between a few hours and a few days each, it's that there's a 
virtually unlimited number of them.  Providing a general-purpose system 
that will sup****t virtually any device you throw at it is unrealistic, 
unless you have either an unlimited market (e.g. Microsoft) or vast 
number of contributors (e.g. Linux). That's the "network economy" at 
work.  We don't have it.

My friend Greg Bailey still sup****ts a fully native Forth OS on PCs for 
a number of customeers (less aggressively since he started working for 
Intellasys), but at least they trust him to configure their hardware. 
And his systems only run large databases (many, many times faster than 
*nix, let alone Windows) plus email/ftp services.  They don't attempt to 
be "everything to everybody".

 > Then you got to convince everyone your OS is the next great thing and
 > to come and write drivers, utils and apps for it etc..

That's the killer.

Cheers,
Elizabeth

-- 
==================================================
Elizabeth D. Rather   (US & Canada)   800-55-FORTH
FORTH Inc.                         +1 310-491-3356
5155 W. Rosecrans Ave. #1018  Fax: +1 310-978-9454
Hawthorne, CA 90250
http://www.forth.com

"Forth-based products and Services for real-time
applications since 1973."
==================================================