Re: PicoGUI1 and 2

Micah wrote:

> > Just the (hopefully unnecessary) plea to keep in mind that a major strength
> > of pg is it's potential good portability to non-Linux embedded targets. 
> Some
> > of those targets only offer a C-Compiler and limited POSIX compatibility.
> > Don't leave this market sector to NanoX!
>
>Definitely. I'd love to get PicoGUI working on eCos, OSKit, NetBSD, L4... the
>main problem currently is that the build system is quite baroque.

Later Micah wrote:

>I do expect we'll be able to reuse a lot of driver code from pg1.
>glib... that depends. If we end up writing most of it in c++, we could
>use uSTL. (A more code-space-efficient implementation of the STL)
>If we're using C, we'd probably want something less huge than glib.

Once you start requiring a C++ cross-compiler, PicoGUI will immediately
become uninteresting for many embedded targets. I was very interested
in porting PicoGUI on two embedded platforms, but watching the direction
of the ideas and the discussions for a while.

(I did not want to use a separate compositing engine in addition to
PicoGUI to implement a certain feature which is required for me. This
feature will likely be part of PicoGUI 2 rather that PicoGIU 1. It is
also implemented in NanoX.)

But now that I see target-specific tools beyond a C cross-compiler thrown
into discussion again and again, my feeling of uncertainty grows. I'm
at the verge of giving up any interest in PicoGUI 2 for my "embedded"
targets.

I don't want to be too pessimistic, but just from the standpoint of a long
time embedded hardware and software developer who has ported quite a lot of
software to real embedded targets, I feel uncertain if PicoGUI 2 will
become the ideal solution (which it could be!!). Actual tool and OS
functionality in the embedded world is often very restricted, more than
many announcements suggest. Don't underestimate the number of targets
which only have a C crosscompiler, limited POSIX library support,
and selfmade or incompletely ported operating systems.

What seems to remain for "embedded" folks like me, is NanoX :-((

All the best
Peter




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