ARM
There have been a few bits of ARM related news which I thought were interesting. We like the ARM architecture (RISC is good) as it is low-powered and yet getting pretty powerful.
First off, the Motorola Atrix Android phone was announced which has odd accessories -
the notion of carrying around your entire computing experience in your pocket and simply plugging it into other form factors is extremely intriguing.
Then NVIDIA announced Project Denver which places an ARM CPU and an GPU on the same chip. This probably doesn't mark the end of x86, but it's awfully cool.
Finally Microsoft announced that the next version of Windows would work on ARM System-on-a-chips.
Does Perl work well under ARM? Is it worth getting a Pandaboard to play around with?
Léon Brocard (aka acme) is an orange-loving Perl eurohacker with many varied contributions to the Perl community, including the GraphViz module on the CPAN. YAPC::Europe was all his fault. He is still looking for a Perl Monger group he can start which begins with the letter 'D'.
Hi acme,
The music player in my living room has an ARM cpu, runs GNU/Linux and the main functionality of the box is based on a fairly recent Perl (5.10). How cool is that?
I blogged last month about it: http://nxadm.wordpress.com/2010/12/11/sometimes-devices-are-funny-logitech-squeezebox-touch
claudio
I was actually successful at compiling Perl on ARM using perlbrew (which donated a few patches to fix some stuff there), or were you asking a rhetorical question? :)
I'm mostly interested in what ARM devices people are using Perl on.
At work we use perl on ARM. It works fine. We use it in a long running daemon, it is pretty cool to benefit of all features of Perl in an embedded world... Notably dynamic ones! :)
Good point, I love my Squeezebox Radio. I just haven't sshed into it yet...
The beagleboard/pandaboard does a lot, but if you just want an ARM box to play with, a Sheevaplug may be an easier route - you don't have to acquire a separate case and a power supply. They are also quicker and cheaper to source in the UK (see www.newit.co.uk).
I have a couple of sheevaplugs and a Buffalo LS-WXL at home. My NSLU2 died a while ago. All run versions of Debian, and perl seems perfectly happy.