#1446 fantom and sedona

ashishwave Sat 12 Mar 2011

how does fantom compares vis-a-vis sedona language and framework(probably, brian was involved in this)

Its cool statements to me are:

Small Devices: Sedona is targeted to be run in very small embedded devices - Sedona applications can be run in under 100KB of memory!

Sedona Virtual Machine: The Sedona virtual machine is a small interpreter written in "ANSI C" designed for portability(Hence, no need for full JVM or CLR etc). It allows code written in the Sedona programming language to be written once, but run on any Sedona device. The VM itself is designed to be highly portable to new microprocessors and operating systems.

another question:

From low memory embedded devices target in future point of view, whether ever 8 bit, 16 bit,32 bit integer and 16-32 bit floats are/will be a part of language specs of fantom.

and whether fantom will run on j2me (say, CLDC profile etc)?

brian Sat 12 Mar 2011

fantom will run on j2me (say, CLDC profile etc)?

Fantom was designed from the start to run on J2ME devices, which is why I avoided most of the 1.5 features like generics in the codebase. However, for performance reasons I did use a couple non-J2ME features like StringBuilder (but have simple plan to port if needed, although some APIs might have to be disabled). However at this point I don't see a long term future for J2ME, there seems to be a trend for embedded devices to switch to full versions of Java.

how does fantom compares vis-a-vis sedona language and framework

Sedona might be considered Fantom's little sister. I wrote Sedona's compiler and its virtual machine. And in fact, the core compiler used by Sedona was based on the original Fantom compiler (written in Java). My brother Andy also had a hand in some of the graphical programming tools for Sedona.

Sedona is a very interesting language and platform for its niche in the Internet of Things. And it also looks like it will be really successful (there are lots of devices already running Sedona). It really deserves a full blog post, which hopefully I will write sometime soon :-)

ashishwave Sat 12 Mar 2011

actually the reason for not using other alternatives on JVM like "jruby" , "groovy" is that they(jruby,groovy etc) are already so much heavily using full java platform, that they can not run on j2me.

Whereas writing my programs carefully in plain java and plain c# enables me to target j2me, .net compact framework.
Hence, when you are saying that fantom will be easily targettable to j2me then it reassures me a lot. Atleast ideally the core of the language should not be dependent on something which is not available in j2me CLDC / android Dalvik/ .NET compact edition.   :-)

ashishwave Sat 12 Mar 2011

additionally,by little sister, do u mean that may be one can view Sedona a real "SUBSET" language and "SUBSET" core standard library of fantom. Fantom as superset of Sedona (atleast on source code level).?

brian Sat 12 Mar 2011

additionally,by little sister, do u mean that may be one can view Sedona a real "SUBSET" language

No - the languages share common ideas, heritage, and compiler design. But they are completely different languages each with very different target uses.

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