Erlang for Robotics

[Ulf Wiger]

On Wed, 6 Dec 2000, aba3600@REDACTED wrote:

>My number one gripe with Erlang is that I do not have a good example of a
>single port program in Erlang, and the matching end in every common
>compiler for every OS available.
>
>Is this possible? Do they need different Erlang sections for each
>langauge?

Don't know exactly what you're getting at without more specifics, but
there shouldn't have to be any difference on the Erlang side.
If you'd use IDL to specify your API between Erlang and the outside,
you would get a well-defined interface. Then again, if you really want
high I/O throughput, you might want to compromise on generality...


>Finally, I only have this one gripe about linux. I have books of gripes
>about every other language. It's just hard to beat the I/O capacity of "C"
>when talking to a home-brew ISA digital I/O card, or the power of a VB
>library when doing video capture via a TWAIN driver.

You'd put the I/O part in a linked-in driver, and send user-friendly
messages to an Erlang process. What would be the typical
message-handling capacity requirement for various types of robot?

As far as the high-level power of VB for certain tasks, well, it's
simply a matter of resources, I guess. User-friendly prefab solutions
take time and money to develop, and there simply aren't that many
Erlang programmers around to do that... yet. (:
I don't know how VB components are best reused by Erlang hackers.

/Uffe
-- 
Ulf Wiger                                    tfn: +46  8 719 81 95
Senior System Architect                      mob: +46 70 519 81 95
Strategic Product & System Management    ATM Multiservice Networks
Data Backbone & Optical Services Division      Ericsson Telecom AB