>A more drastic way to shrink the executable would be to strip some of
>the more esoteric modes and depths out of BitBlt. You probably don't
>need alpha-blending on your PDA, and you probably don't need support
>for 32-bit color (yet!). The disadvantage of this is that some Squeak
>programs won't run on the resulting VM; I would thus consider this a
>desperate last resort.

I was looking through some old Smalltalk papers yesterday and found some
that do this kind of thing to achieve a fit.

- I have the paper on "TinyTalk" which ran in 64K.  It's only a two-pager
so I'm not completely clear on how they did things, but it looks more like
Little Smalltalk's (Timothy Budd's) text-only interface.  Obviously, very
limiting and few things would run on it.

- There was also Rosetta, which ran on 128K Exidy Sorcerer's.  The paper on
Rosetta goes into more detail on the interface.  The Sorcerer (for the
three or four of us that still remember it :-) didn't have a hi-res
display, per se.  Instead, it had the character generator patterns in RAM,
so you could put up whatever 256 patterns you wanted.  Obviously, BitBlt
means something completely different in this context.  It does have the
advantage that window-like things (even Browsers) could be done in it.

Fortunately, with PDAs today, we don't have to get down to these extremes
in memory paring.  But it seems more do-able to know that people got
Smalltalk shoehorned even into these conditions.

Mark

--------------------------
Mark Guzdial : Georgia Tech : College of Computing : Atlanta, GA 30332-0280
(404) 894-5618 : Fax (404) 894-0673 : guzdial at cc.gatech.edu
http://www.cc.gatech.edu/gvu/people/Faculty/Mark.Guzdial.html