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Tao release Free intent ADK with Digital Magazine
Mike Bouma writes: "A special release of the intent Application Development Kit for Windows and Linux is included on the cover CD of the current issue of digital magazine. Intent is the core technology used in the AmigaDE and is also the standard programming and the platform independent content environment chosen by the Open Contents Platform Association (OCPA) for digital consumer devices. Consumer Electronic Giants including Hitachi, Sony, Kyocera, PSION, Nokia, NEC, Motorola, Grundig, JVC, Fujitsu, Sharp, Epson, Intel, Pioneer, Metrowerks, Sega, Bandai and Capcom are supporting the platform. A full new release of the AmigaDE Software Development Kit will become available for general developers later this year. Software developed for intent works with the AmigaDE platform as well. Recently a partnership between Amiga and Nokia was revealed and finally here are some links to recent interviews with AmigaDE software developers."
The Amiga/TAO environment is pretty damn cool, easily the best software VM architecture out there, and is basically what .net and Java should be, but aren't.
.net and Java, but rather works with an "unbounded register set", which is a wierd, but definitely cool way of doing things.
.net and Java.
It's NOT a forth-inspired stack based architecture like
Sure, on any given processor architecture, for enough registers, it must eventually devolve into stack/main memory access, but the VM takes care of the best mapping for you. Thus, it can take full advantage of modern RISC architectures.
It's not currently fully open source (more source-available-proprietary), but they strongly support the GPL software community, and intend to continue doing so in future.
Open sourcers actually interested in best-of-breed systems should be cloning Tao, not
I wonder if we could make enough noise to get an amiga.slashdot.org, with boing ball, nifty color scheme, and all Amiga articles front-paged, much as the apple.slashdot.org have.
And in other news, Roy Orbison and AmigaOS were seen staggering in a decomposed fashion along a disused mining railway in the Back of Beyond whilest sharing a ghostly joint and sipping from a half-empty bottle of bourbon.
I'm out of my tree just now but please feel free to leave a banana.
The license that comes with the ADK CD allows you to sell your software (to people who run the Intent VM), ie create an app using it and all the millions of cell phones and/or set-top-boxes that use Tao Intent will be able to run it! I did not see any mention of royalties in the comments from the Tao employee on http://ann.lu/, so there may not be any.
This is Tao's Intent dev kit, it has nothing to do with Amiga beyond Amiga base their product on this. In fact Tao are working on their own APIs for all the things Amiga are doing, because Amiga have taken so long to get their act (and products) together. Releasing a free dev kit has allowed Tao to capture the market Amiga could not, and they are in effect killing Amiga's market.
You can find some interesting comments regarding the Tao ADK and AmigaDE here on OSNews.
The Amiga Digital Environment has Tao`s technology at its core. Amiga Inc is working closely with the Tao Group to add programming, interface and multimedia enhancements to this core environment. Amiga Inc also provides developer support for content creating software companies and even bedroom developers, something Tao can`t be bothered with much, as they are fully occupied by working with the industry giants.
Regarding the ADK: "The ADK released with digital magazine runs on Personal Computers supporting Windows and Linux (RedHat 7.2) and incorporates intent media libraries, C and C++ compilers, a PersonalJava(tm) engine and various tools."
Some related links:
If people would simply embrace this new technology it could bring back competition within the operating system market again. The AmigaDE/Intent can easily be ported to any operating system. For instance if BeOS or OS/2 today supported this technology and the AmigaDE takes of, as I know it will, these OSes would be ensured to get new applications, regardless of userbase or eventual financial difficulties.
Also normal consumers should not have to worry about which operating systems their mobile phones, PDAs, STBs, fridges or even desktops are running. This technology can make this a reality. IMO it is about time to stop hyping .NET, we don`t want to worsen the already choking OS monopoly, or do we? .Net isn`t much to be worried about, most companies now know what it means to be dependent on the Redmond bully. It is time for a change and you will see the first results pretty soon.
The AmigaDE can act as a trojan horse by providing a binary identical application layer between Linux, Windows and any other operating system. Let the innovations of the 80s return, not just drivers for newer hardware like CD-writers, 3D hardware, internet modems, all that can easily be accomplished on decade old classic Amigas as well, and has been implemented without access to annual multi-billion dollars profits unlike the OS monopolist. If you would have asked me in 1989 when I bought my first Amiga what computing would be like in the year 2000, I would have said that I expected computers to act instantly to user input, no noticeable boot times and excellent small/elegant hardware. Instead beyond 2000 PCs mostly still are big/noisy/slow booting devices and are less responsive as compared to Amigas from the 80s... It`s time for a change!
I don't get it -- given that this intent VM is fast, what else does it offer over other VMs? Functionality is certainly not very much different from its competitors. Is it easier to develop for? Maybe not. And most important -- is it free (as in speech)? It's not. So why should I become dependent on this nice VM with it's closed source nature?
Elate is the OS. Infact, Elate is a Real Time Operating System, which has the capability to translate a specific code. This means, that Elate can run this code where ever it is.
Intent is based on Elate and is merly just a media library. Providing sound and most of all, a desktop or GUI environment.
VP is Elates main language. This is an compiled version of your C program or Java program. VP stands for Virtual Prcessor, and that is what translates the code. You can compile your code, let it be Java,C or C++ or many others, it can be compiled into VP, which will then be translated and ran as a native version of the code.
Well if Amiga can do all the above said, then I wish them the best of luck and hope that this will finally get all operating systems to a shoulder to shoulder level. I think people should use what they want and not be forced on something because everyone else is using it!!
If it is possible to launch apps like native apps to the OS, I am wondering if it will be possible to launch AmigaDE Sheep programs/scripts in the same way. When will this stuff be released anyway? Any idea on how much it will cost to put and AmigaDE environment on my machine? When will Sheep come out and will it be included in handheld versions of DE?
Are there any plans to port elate technology over to qnx rtp 6.x?
What does the API look like? Is it "complete" or just simple and basic? Compared to class libraries in Java, .Net, Qt, Cocoa? Do I get any OO features at all if I'm using c++, or is it a straight c-like API?
How are the networking features, do I find ORB-like capabilities in there somewhere, like Java RMI or CORBA?
One point that is interesting is that the license that ships with the ADK does allow you to sell your applications to other intent users (and keep them closed source if you want)!
Now let's say as an example that customer A is a mobile phone company who is going to ship one million units with intent installed, if you create a game (let's say) and you charge 1 dollar for it then you have potential of up to 1 million dollars revenue. Now here's the good bit. Customer B also like's the look of your game and is selling 1 million set-top boxes - then without recompiling - your game works on his intent powered set-top you've just got yourself up to another million quid :) Get the picture :)
OK so that is a little contrived but there is definately a lot of potential there. New markets are now being opened up by Tao in the consumer electronics space and all it needs it someone with a bit of talent and a good idea to exploit those new markets.
Anyway read the license and readme in the ADK for full details.
Remember the ADK is FREE (in terms of free beer). So you have a chance to evaluate our technology at no financial cost to yourself.
<reminisce mode>
Want to call a function? Stash your arguments in registers, and bang!, you're there. Of course, when you got to the edges (few used, or most used), you had to ``fill'' or ``spill'' from RAM (or cache), but it was all but invisible to the programmer. They had separate instruction and data memory (``Harvard'' architecture), so you could access both simultaneously.
IMHO as a programmer (not architect), the only shortcoming was their condition-code setup. There was no CC register---you did a comparison, and stashed the result in whatever register was handy, branching later on testing that reg. true or false. They missed a bet---they should have stashed a full set of conditions in the register, so you could compare once, then test as many conditions as your little heart desired, instead of: compare LT, jp T, compare EQ, jp F, ..., do: compare, jp LT, jp EQ, .... Ah, well...
AMD introduced it as a general-computing chip, for high-end Unix boxes, workstations, &c. Unfortunately, they did it just as the IBM PC juggernaut was coming up to speed, and the x86 flood swept it away. AMD tried to convert it into an embedded-system chip (which is where I met it), but like so many others (88000 [Honeywell?], 32000 [National?]), they faded away. AMD officially dropped support for it a few years ago. Damn, that was one sweet chip.
(Of course, the Harvard architecture was fit to give HW engineers apoplexy, but that wasn't my problem. :-) If this interests you, just do a Google search on "AMD 29000". I'm not the only one still carrying the torch for it. So many of those 32-bit efforts were funcionally superior to what's left today.
</reminisce mode>
I refuse to believe corporations are people until Texas executes one. -- desert rain on http://www.dailykos.com/user/
This URL: http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~koopman/stack_computers/c ontents.htmlContains a cool book on stack machines. Check it out before you slam them. Having said that, there is no good reason for the JVM to be stack- rather than register based. I think the best way to have a portable runtime were to leave the code at the stage of an AST and let every VM implementer to compile to what they want (including native)
Tao 'portable assembly' thingie is way kewl and has been around for a while, too. (from since way before Java, etc.)
This URL: http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~koopman/stack_computers/c ontents.html Contains a cool book on stack machines. Check it out before you slam them. Having said that, there is no good reason for the JVM to be stack- rather than register based. I think the best way to have a portable runtime were to leave the code at the stage of an AST and let every VM implementer to compile to what they want (including native) Tao 'portable assembly' thingie is way kewl and has been around for a while, too. (from since way before Java, etc.)
I don't see how the 29000 is any special, in particular relating to Tao. It seems to be a rather generic chip, quite a me-too effort from
AMD. Not that it was bad, but let's see:
Unbounded register set' is most commonly achieved by register renaming these days. SPARC-style sliding 'register windows' are generally agreed to have been a mistake due to implementation complexity (note how SPARC has always been behind on Mhz to competing RISC designs (as long as those still existed) Lots of registers are good, but don't forget that 128 of them takes up 8 bits
of space per-register from the opcode. The first (almost) orthogonal register set I am aware of is the one of M68K, which was quite CISC. Harvard architecture takes away the option of writing self-modifying code, which can be quite powerful. Every chip since 68020 is Harvard, so the point is moot anyway. I totally agree on CCs - the architectures than left them out (MIPS was first) lost a lot more than the miniscule gains in implementation complexity. Not only should you have CCs, but also predication (ala ARM and now Merced), IMHO. I think the best-ever RISC architecture was ARM, followed by PowerPC, but in
general, I find the concept of a 'register' a bit offensive. Come to think of it, a 'register' is
just memory with addressing restrictions and is just a performance hack. My ideal architecture would be some kind of a vector IRAM (say Playstation 2?), I guess.
Lots of registers