Chirimen, a Firefox OS-Powered IoT Single-Board Computer Developed by Mozilla

Post by pjc50 » Fri, Jan 08, 2016, 2:59 PM UTC

benten10 wrote: post #52

mwambua wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most embedded applications consist of a tight loop of constant polling. People slow things down by using delays... But if you use the wrong sort of delay (read: the most popular one https://www.arduino.cc/en/Reference/Delay ), you'll end up executing nops instead of powering down the processor

What would then be the right way to sleep? I've always wanted to do something like 'sleep until event and do absolutely nothing till them', but end up using the delay every time.

  main()
  {
  configure_interrupts();
  while(1)
  {
     do_irq_bottom_halves();
     sleep(); // "wfi" in ARM
  }
  }

Post by mundanevoice » Fri, Jan 08, 2016, 3:04 PM UTC

espadrine wrote: post #36

mundanevoice wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's an assumption. Just look at the contributions of some of the senior staff engineers such as Brad Fitzpatrick for GO, Jeff dean to name a few on their projects. I don't see any parallel at Mozilla who could rival them. Well, for really ambitious software projects, you really need someone who has tonnes of experience and can write really good code. Not to say that Mozilla doesn't have any, but I thin…

Both Go and Jeff Dean's projects are meant for server-side work, so it is unsurprising that Mozilla is not a rival in this space. However, it turns out they are heavily innovating in the same space as Go with their stunning work on Rust. Additionally, they are building world-class next-gen products with their work on Servo and Daala. Not to mention fantastic tools such as http://rr-project.org/ . I believe your asses…

Post by janjongboom » Fri, Jan 08, 2016, 3:07 PM UTC

beardicus wrote: post #51

Welp. Two hours in and the comments are shaping up as you'd expect on HN. Is it really so hard to empathize with people who have different skill sets than yourself? Yes, C would be more efficient. Yes, this wouldn't be very cost effective used in a high volume product. Yes, it's a little funky to write a web page just to plonk your script tag in there. But, if you spend all day doing front-end dev with jQuery and jus…

Post by frik » Fri, Jan 08, 2016, 3:23 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #56

beardicus wrote: post #51

Welp. Two hours in and the comments are shaping up as you'd expect on HN. Is it really so hard to empathize with people who have different skill sets than yourself? Yes, C would be more efficient. Yes, this wouldn't be very cost effective used in a high volume product. Yes, it's a little funky to write a web page just to plonk your script tag in there. But, if you spend all day doing front-end dev with jQuery and jus…

I agree, and I come from an old-school C and embedded background. If you do it in C, you have the opposite problem: interacting with the hardware is easy, speaking to a web API becomes a huge pain. There's an "impedance mismatch", which has to be overcome somewhere. And computing power is getting cheaper and cheaper. We're at the point where if you have a little board in a case with some I/O connectors, the CPU will…

Post by StevePerkins » Fri, Jan 08, 2016, 3:50 PM UTC

mikegioia wrote: post #62

StevePerkins wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every year as December 31st looms, I sit down and parcel out my end-of-year donations to organizations I care about. Wikipedia, EFF, and of course some non-tech-related charities. Every year, I weigh whether I should throw some bucks to the Mozilla Foundation. I've been using their browsers, under one name or another, for over 20 years since the day I first discovered the web. It's been the most important piece of so…

This is a strange comment that starts in one place, and ends with your musings on the collapse of Mozilla. First off, Mozilla didn't have FF "fall into their lap" from Netscape. Netscape spun it off and gave birth to Mozilla. They absolutely do not consider Firefox legacy software and you'll need to back that up somehow for me to believe it. They may very well be a better company at $2M than they are at $300M, but th…