Chillout Lounge

Embedded CLR Vs. Tiny CLR

Last week while I Was discussing with Girish (My Colleague,my best friend)
the Topic of Embedded CLR and Tiny CLR Came up.

There was a misunderstanding that, both Embedded CLR and Tiny CLR are
same...

I was little inquisitive, So, I Thought I shall explain my understanding

TinyCLR from Microsoft includes a real time Micro Kernel and is a new
platform which extends .NET tools. And is a newly architected/scaled down
version against the CLR - ECMA 335.

This TinyCLR is right now used in the Microsoft's SPOT Watches and MS is
planning to use it on all of the resource constraint devices.

[Guys, If you have not heard about SPOT, do check out http://direct.msn.com
This is one of the cool gadget initiative from Microsoft, this really beats
me. :-) ]

To put this in simple words, think about the CLR Being the OS. :-)

Embedded CLR on the other hand is Paul Pahm's research project at MIT
[http://colony.mit.edu/research/embedded-clr/ ], where he tries to recreate
the same but in a very effective manner, by unifying type-safety and
portability of VM's with real time OS's real-time scheduling.

He tries to do this with his 3 goals

Port CLR 335 to a Real-Time OS
make the new RTOS handle activities which includes threads and work items
scheduling CLR Threads using work items
he has tried to achieve this using his previous project MMLite [a realtime
scheduler] and recently he has published his papers and has demonstrated
this also.

and Paul is also planning to recreate TinyCLR in C right from scratch.

Man. This is an interesting effort. :-)



posted by Logu Krishnan : 11:32 PM