On Thu, Aug 25, 2016 at 4:50 PM, Tudor Girba <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > We are very happy to make the following announcement: > > > Lam Research, a leading supplier of wafer fabrication equipment and services > to the global semiconductor industry, is an experienced user of the Smalltalk > programming language. Smalltalk is a key component in Lam's software control > system for a broad range of the equipment it manufactures. Tudor Girba is a > leading member of the tools and environment development effort in Pharo, > having architected the Glamorous Toolkit for live programming. Eliot Miranda > is author of the Cog virtual machine that underlies Pharo and other Smalltalk > dialects. > > Lam has engaged Tudor and Eliot to explore potential enhancements in Lam's > use of Smalltalk. These enhancements range from running > highly optimized Smalltalk on low cost, single board computers to enhancing Lam's Smalltalk development practices with state-of-the-art live programming. During the engagement, Tudor and Eliot successfully moved a key communication component of the control system to Pharo. It was a challenging task aimed at extending the reach of Lam’s system to the Pharo world including the option of executing on ARM processors. > > Cheers, > Tudor Girba, Eliot Miranda and Chris Thorgrimsson
Great to hear of this - particularly since I guess some(much?) of it was dealing with proprietary systems. I'll understand if you can't answer the following questions in detail. I'm interested in: * what model was the single board computers? Or what were its specs/price? Or how much of your experience might carry over to a board like the BeagleBone Black, particularly wrt to embedded control via it Programmable Real-time Unit. * did the communication component involve a proprietary protocol? Or one of the industry standard "process automation" protocols listed here[1] ? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automation_protocols cheers -ben
