Adrian Hey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote,
> My objection to the use of GC (and by implication all current Haskell
> implementations) in embedded systems would be that if your program is
> sufficiently complex/powerful that it can't be implemented as some kind
> of _finite_ state machine, then it can never be part of a robust system
> (which has finite memory resources). Put simply, if you don't know how
> much memory you need, how can you ever be confident you have enough?
>
> Hmm, now having written that, I'm wondering how the Erlang community
> addressed this problem. I believe Erlang is targeted at applications
> which I would class as 'embedded'.
>
> Anybody know the answer?
Erlang applications are characterised as being soft-realtime
applications:
http://www.erlang.org/faq/x847.html#SOFT-REALTIME
In one sentence, I would characterise this as ``it is fast
enough most of the time.'' This seems to be good enough for
many (most?) embedded systems.
I see your point about insisting on finite state machines,
but as the functionality expected from embedded systems
increases, this ideal viewpoint will become increasingly
infeasible in practice.
Manuel
