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Have you read some of the doc provided in the link? it seems that one can build component using c++. FAT is a simple and small file system that can be easily used on small devices. With JavaScript, because of its interpreting nature, it helps developers rapid testing i rekon. I don't know much about squeak so it would have some advantages on the device i guess. however, i guess there would be much c++ based development would be going on later. keep an eye on this if you are interested but telling that it won't work. please. grow up.

Actually, this doesn't look like they're going to use it for more than experimentation. Just look at the licence terms, they're far too liberal

I must agree that it looks like a weird technology, though.

Simplicity and broad adoption.

(yeah, broad adoption; Squeak is *big* at Disney.)



What makes you think it's a next-gen system? It's a research system. And you know what my suspicion is? That's Nintendo answer for homebrew apps on the Wii.

FAT access for the SD card: check.
Interpreted languages to sandbox the development away from the "crown jewels" (i.e., the encryption keys), and to ensure portability between the development environment and the target environment: check.
Use of a graphics library that can make great use of hardware acceleration: check.

But of course I'd rather have Lua instead of Javascript; Lua is much, *much* bigger among the game development community, so it's definitely a wiser choice. Maybe in the near future, who knows?



?!

I think you're mixing the facts here.



Uh... Noooo? The only Carbon apps you see nowadays on Mac OS X are those based on large existing codebases that started back on Mac OS 7, like those by Adobe and Microsoft, and apps ported over from Linux and use the eventual toolkit that doesn't bind to Cocoa (like Qt), but those are really few and far between (and to be honest I've never seen a single native Mac OS X app based on Qt).

Not a *single* interesting Mac OS X-exclusive app is written in Carbon.



Careful, you're talking about Nintendo here. You know, that little company in Japan that simply prints money out of a little thing called Nintendo DS, as if the Wii wasn't enough?


Edit: the obligatory Lua pimping

Edited 2007-11-30 20:21

I think their choice of JS bindings may be related to their other choice of using (WHATWG/HTML5) CanvasRenderingContext2D (from <canvas>, initially from WebKit IIRC). Not sure which influenced which, though.

With some small bootstrapping, you can actually write something that will run in a browser, then copy the code over to this thing - using whatever debugging utilities that already exist for browsers.

JS as a language is.. well, at least more widely available than <canvas>. (Think Acrobat, Flash, WSH, kjs...) I have no idea if they wrote their JS interpret from scratch, though; it sure looks like it.

> Not a *single* interesting Mac OS X-exclusive app is written in Carbon.

Finder?

It's a research system, not a console system. All sorts of crazy things can be used in a research system.

(And it runs on x86. That alone should tell you it's not for a console system...)

Edited 2007-11-30 20:26

NetBSD is capable of running in x86 and even on Dreamcast (Hitachi SuperH RISC CPU), with a gazillion platforms inbetween.

They can work on x86 while developing and then port it to a different platform.

Edit: grammar, grammar

Edited 2007-11-30 20:38 UTC

It's a research system, not a console system

That doesn't imply or answer anything, the question is Why does nintendo do that and with such choice of technology? To me it seems more like someone playing around in one of the Nintendo R&D houses, as the technology has nothing to do with anything i've ever seen from them.

btw: I'm an official developer.

"Why on earth? And why using such choice of technologies?
Squeak? Javascript? FAT as filesystem? this is horrible!
Doesn't seem at all like a wise choice for a next-next-gen system."

Yeah. And what's up with the Wii? Such a weak video card? Horrible CPU? The specs are nothing compared to the XBox 360 and PlayStation 3! This doesn't seem like a wise choice for a next-next-gen console. The Wii will fail horribly, I tell you!

What? They sold how many millions of those things? Oh, never mind.

Would you start your research operating system by supporting ZFS, Ruby and .NET? All this stuff is irrelevant as what matters is extensibility and the possibility to implement other stuff later.