On Thu, 24 Sep 1998, Noplock, Norman F. wrote:

> In my opinion the pic and JAVA were made for each other.  The reduced
> intruction set of JAVA was conceived and developed primarily so it could
> reside using very little real estate.  So yes I for one see a great future
> for JAVA and pic.

You are mostly right imho, but unfortunately, Java VM's must implement so
many default objects to be able to run in the first place, that the VM's
size puts it outside the range of the PIC program memory. On top of that,
the Java VM implementations make extensive use of a stack and the PIC is
very short on that.

However, it should be possible to cross-compile Java bytecode into PIC
assembly assuming that the respective programs use a small subset of Java
so the resulting code does not exceed the PIC program store size.

This is a fairly complicated project, about on par with an optimizing C
cross-compiler implementation for the PIC. It can and probably will be
done, but I don't see the amateurs on the list doing it (me included) ;)
It's far more likely that the answer will come from the GNU corner or from
others who have already made optimizing C and Basic compilers (as opposed
to interpreters) for the PIC.

Last, I'd like to add that Java may not be a perfect choice for embedded
programming, at least not with the high level programming structures used
today (as opposed to bytecode hacking or its equivalent), for about the
same reason(s) that C++ is not very popular on small and tiny micros.

0.02 Agorot

Peter