On 1/2/13 5:34 PM, Tom Harris wrote:
+1 for Forth!
+1 for your opinions on PICs & AVRs. We can buy low end NXP ARM Cortex M0
chips (e.g. LPC1113) for less than the PIC18 we were using before, and it
has a real compiler and (unlike the real world) evidence of intelligent
design!
Do you really need an OS? Surely for a box that is only ever going to be an
NTP server you just need a network interface and good maths? I've just seen
a later comment where you mention floating point support, but would 64 bit
integer maths work just as well?
Well, one might not need a full-up multitasking OS, but I'd sure like to
have a high level interface to the network (say BSD sockets or something
like that). And most OSes (or OS-like infrastructure) also gives you
some handy stuff like timers, threads, queues, etc.
If you are doing something that is TRULY single function, the "one big
loop" scheme can work, particularly if you've got a lot of nice
libraries to do stuff like string handling/parsing/device interaction.
I think the dividing line might be where you are trying to do more than
one thing with different time scales. It would be straightforward to do
something like multiple PID loops with a common sample/update rate (like
a lot of PLC industrial controllers do), but as soon as you start
running things at different rates (check the Ethernet, check the serial
port, update the loop, etc.) having an OS to do the book-keeping is
pretty nice.
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