5 Jul
2012
5 Jul
'12
12:18 p.m.
Well said. This is the best explanation for
PalmOS' dominance that
I've seen. It all makes sense.
I really should pick up one of the 68K-based Palm Pilots for some
hacking. I heard (ages ago) that it's pretty trivial to get different
code running on them. At that point it's just a 68K with a nice
bitmapped display; have cross compiler, will travel.
From a machine code perspective, the architecture is
remarkably
uninteresting -- which is, from a machine code perspective, exactly what
you want. :)
However, I was an early adopter of Plua, which is a port of Lua 5.0 to
PalmOS. It runs merrily on 68K and ARM Palms, has a "cross-compiler"
(disclaimer: I was the port maintainer for the Mac OS X Pluac) and even
supports network access and other neat tricks. Its chief disadvantages
are that it is slow compared to native code, more so than you would
expect for a lightweight interpreter, and it does not transcend some of
the limitations of PalmOS well (for example, individual variables cannot
consume more than 24K or so of memory, leading to inelegant "paging
strategies" for long strings and complex tables).
--
------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ --
Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com
-- I think, therefore I'm dangerous. ------------------------------------------