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Comment by iamshs | Hacker News Reader

What is the software running on this? Interestingly, MS is mum on it. What a change. Also, can the microphone connect to Siri, Google Now? I know Cortana is running on it.

Must say, looks very very alluring.

Edit:- Sizing:- http://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-band/en-us/sizing

From the accessories it looks like it can be wirelessly charged, and has BLE:- http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/buy/productI...

Edit2:- Does not look like wireless charging. It is "Connector: Magnetically coupled connector to USB"

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> What is the software running on this? Interestingly, MS is mum on it.

I'd really like to know. No matter what the answer is, it's going to be fascinating. Even if it's Windows but they've decided not to broadcast that.

I imagine it's Windows CE. Is there any reason to suspect otherwise?

Well, I took the person saying "MS is mum on it" as "they are keeping it secret." If they are keeping it secret, that's interesting. But I'm possibly reading into this something that isn't there.

Hi! Dev lead here.

Obviously not an official MS response!

We are using a single threaded lightweight runtime based around call backs. We are completely non-blocking on all IO (including all sensors), and our CPU spends the majority of its time in a very low power mode. Every microsecond of CPU time is accounted for and justified!

I cannot wait until people look at our battery size in mAh.

That sounds cool! Can you disclose/admit what language it was written in? I'm very tempted to try this out instead of getting a fitbit (not at all impressed with the Apple or Android watches so far).

[not an MS employee] I bet on C or C++

> single threaded lightweight runtime based around call backs

Sounds like Javascript to me, or maybe something like Erlang. I wonder if we'll be able to install apps on the device or just build external apps for cell phones. What about hooking it up to your desktop/laptop for notifications and stuff? I'm thinking there could be some cool features there.

I'd rule out Erlang, if they wanted a functional language they'd probably go with F#, seeing how this is MS.

I don't think this is enough info, even for an educated guess. What they're describing (single threaded/callbacks) could even be C/libevent, no?

Edit: Also,

> Every microsecond of CPU time is accounted for and justified!

...for me, this rules out any kind of VM contained language

Our runtime is straight ANSI C.

No comment on anything else mentioned:)

If you also use libevent, I win! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8532192

Congratulations for this btw. I'm not an MS fan, but I hope this works for you guys!

Thanks for the congrats!

Our software was completely written from the ground up. We started with an empty main.c file. :)

A number of us lead software engineers are on hacker news and we all love the latest programming languages. We got a bunch of really super cool stuff in here, but all in straight C and running in very little memory space. We're dying to start an engineering blog, we believe some of the lessons we learned about applying modern software engineering techniques to an embedded device are very valuable. (Fun fact! Embedded Engineers have been avoiding dynamic allocation well before it was cool!)

We're hoping to get proper continuations in sometime soon. :) Our main problem is saving/restoring the stack without losing too much performance! (Cycles equal battery life, I cannot justify pushing for a move to continuations if the battery life hit is noticeable to the user!)

Must have been very cool to be bit-saving and over-optimizing in our "era of plenty". Almost nobody cares about a couple extra MB nowadays. And starting from a blank main.c? Gutsy.

I hope you get your dev blog approved :)

> Almost nobody cares about a couple extra MB nowadays.

Megabytes? That'd have been nice! :)

I'd love to know more. If you're up for it please reach out to me 100% anonymously - tom at theverge dot com

Thanks :)

Not Python!

I would guess C or C++ too.

Any word on an open API/raw data export or is that a policy, not a eng decision?

On the product announcement page, it's listed as Dual 100mAh rechargeable lithium-ion polymer batteries.

Given that it is ARM CM4, this must be a custom firmware.

add: and if they left JTAG/SWD pads exposed, then you could consider it “arduino on steroids” with some builtin sensors and GCC toolchain available ;)

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