Roman Shaposhnik's

Ever since Sun Studio compilers and tools started to support Linux we've been present at various Linux shows and LinuxTAG in Germany has always ranked pretty high on the list. This year, however, we had a very special reason to make it to LinuxTAG: it just so happened that the release date for Sun Studio 12 (our first release ever to officially support Linux at the same level Solaris has always been supported) coincided perfectly with the LinuxTAG 2007 in Berlin. Add to it the fact that Solaris Express Developer Edition 6/07 was supposed to have its release around the same timeframe and it doesn't take a genius to figure out that we had to do something extraordinary for all those hardworking C, C++ and Fortran developers out there. The real developers. We had a couple of ideas like having a contest similar to the Google's Summer of Code or just bringing a couple of kegs of beer on site but they all either were too heavyweight to pull off in just a couple of weeks or downright illegal. Finally we've asked ourselves a very basic question: since we all are, in fact developers, what would we, personally, get excited about? I hate to say it but it turned out that the BSD community had beaten us to a punch with the idea that was unanimously deemed to be the most exciting one, so we had to opt out for programmable robots. After all, it is much easier to control a robot, you know.

And that's how controlling a LEGO Mindstorm NXT robot using Solaris Express Developer Edition and Sun Studio has become THE whole point of the contest:


Here's a funny bit of trivia...[Read More]