Hi All,
There is a lot here I'm trying to parse through, though I admit I just skimmed these.
However, I'll just give my perspective on the VAST platform general positioning with regards to ARM and RISC-V.
As we are discovering right in our own backyard (in Raleigh, NC), there is a lot of interest in the capabilities of the platform from a business perspective.
Not only are we finding that companies and folks are more receptive than we theorized, but we are doing exactly what we said we would do
in my speech at ESUG...which is to push Smalltalk out beyond our traditional bubbles.
Admittedly, the enterprise space is the playing field of interest for us. I find they are more receptive to the value of a "services company" because they work at scale
and know how quickly costs for themselves can spin out of control when they don't have a guaranteed support channel to back up the code they are getting.
As I've seen at least twice this year, even one "incident" for these companies can cost them far more to resolve then anything they would pay us on
an annual basis. We had a case where we worked support in conjunction with another supporting company (a massive, yet I'll kindly keep unnamed one) that took three
months just to get the customer to the correct support level engineer. The amount of money lost I'm betting was...well...a lot. And I know the support level
costs of the other company and it was many times more than what we charge which is a double-hit. This is mostly an educational issue and sometimes requires
companies get burned before they understand this. In the meantime we will just keep providing anecdotal evidence.
Given this is the space of interest, we are seeing opportunities for the VAST platform and our services in the IoT and edge-computing enterprise space.
Even for our own customers who may think this doesn't concern them...look at Amazon AWS 64-bit ARM EC2 instances.
Our 64-bit ARM offering is going to allow our customers to take advantage of running on those types of platforms and I'm sure will optimize costs in the future as that market solidifies.
The VAST platform can run on any number of edge devices and offers a great program model.
Companies here in the Research Triangle in Raleigh are interested in our debugging and cross-platform development techniques and capabilities. We continue to
be sponsors of RIoT (Raleigh IoT community), and work through them to form new relationships and get our message out.
So there is no shortage of business cases in this area.
We have run Vast on ARM for awhile and it runs really well. Someone noted to us that it takes a little bit more power than python, but not much. And this is fine, because
we have not done any power optimizations yet. There is some work going on in the background here to make sure the ARM vm is optimized and ready to be
productized and supported by us.
There was mention of RISC-V. To be honest, the vm can be placed on just about anything that has some flavor of Linux and a C compiler.
RISC-V just doesn't have wide-spread device support for experimentation yet. Once it has something pretty
simple to just go get (like a Raspberry Pi), I'm sure one of us will get it and put VAST on there in a number of hours just like ARM.
Until then, we are in no rush...there is enough forward movement and momentum going on at the company without it.
There was some mention of X. That is not our primary concern at the moment in this space...most of what we are looking to do is headless.
We are thinking more background processing of business logic, AI-integration, web server integration. Perhaps a front-end smart device running a
Vast UI would be great, but I would agree that we wouldn't want our current UI framework for such a task. We will see...if I see enough interest in that
area that will result in a new revenue stream then I would be all to happy to do a complete replacement of the framework. But we don't see it as a current
showstopper in this space.
Concerning the Pine devices...there doesn't seem to be anything stopping Vast from running on it so enjoy:)
Hope this is useful information for folks.
- Seth