in reply to robotic laser welder
I guess I don't have the same problem with the customer building a new machine since they cost a quarter mil ($) each, but since it is very highly tweaked already and the only moving parts are the powder bucket and laser head, I think if Perl is used it will probably be mainly in developing data models which will get crunched by the preprocessor, and maybe in a web site that handles requests. It would be very cool though if we could have a more realistic 3D display on the terminal but not so sure it is needed right now.
Your links ginseng are very interesting, especially I noticed rtlinux has gotten more mature it seems, and the puffin page (Mat project on sourceforge) mentions that you can have different processes written in different languages.
I still am pretty interested though in seeing if a partly Perl system is fast enough to write to a rotating mirror. Not for the system mentioned above, for a simple rgb projector setup. Another friend (a DJ) has a powerful laser like that used in clubs but it is mainly powered by a dedicated PCI card and an already large library of (C,windows) programs but I'll have to keep thinking about what is possible.
Thanks again for a very interesting post.