New Robot Control System!

[Eldarion]

Originally Posted by ThomasP

"adaptability to a wider variety of programming languages"

Anyone else thinking .NET?

I think it's the most obvious choice, one control library for the bot and people get a choice of 3 different languages to program in.

Interpreted languages, or for that matter languages that require large library files to run compiled programs, are generally not suitable for embedded control. Simply put, it would require a small laptop in order to do a typical robot's tasks using Java, .NET, Visual Basic, or any other language of that type due to the increased runtime overhead, both in terms of the CPU and RAM.

The fewer layers of abstraction, the faster the program will run, with assembly language being the fastest. However, this speed increase is offset by increased development time. I believe a good compromise is reached in the C programming language, as do many other robot programmers!

Something like EasyC is different in that it actually reduces your high-level instructions to C and them compiles the resulting C code (correct me if I am wrong here!). If the current trends continue and no low-level access is required, then EasyC is probably the best solution to the programming problem.

There are two ways that you can utilize increased CPU speed or RAM storage:
1.) You can program as efficiently as you did on the smaller machine, and as a result the machine can do more tasks, or
2.) You can fill up the new resources with programming language "bloat", offering few new features and probably introducing many bugs!

Just my $0.02.