Squeak on Palm OS 5?

Joern Eyrich Joern.Eyrich at syngenio.de
Tue Oct 8 09:46:52 UTC 2002


As far as i know, these limits are still there, slightly less than 64k for a chunk of the dynamic heap. I remember someone proposed to allocate a big chunk of the storage heap instead, which doesn't have these restrictions, but then the storage heap is write protected for normal applications or something like that.

My understanding is that this first release of PalmOS 5 is not really intended to run native ARM applications. It's intended to emulate an 68k processor. Because the syscalls are native and applications are supposed to spend most of their time in syscalls anyway, speedups are still expected (and the emulator need not necessarily be slower than the hardware 68k either). For computing-intensive things, you can call ARM-native subroutines, though.

as to the multimedia applications, I'm not sure if they are "normal" apps written to the public API. Don't they all come bundled with a particular device? So they might be working their magic "behind the scenes".

JohnMaloney at earthlink.net wrote:
> 
> Speed was one issue for PalmOS. The other was the memory model, which
> would only give you 32K contiguous blocks of memory. I would hope that
> Palm OS 5 relaxes that restriction. It seems like they'd have to, since
> they are getting into photos and MP3 players which need big chunks of
> memory.
> 
>         -- John
> 
> At 8:38 AM -0700 10/3/02, Michael Rueger wrote:
> >does anybody know more about Palm OS 5?
> >
> >http://www.palminfocenter.com/print.asp?ID=4279&s=1
> >
> >The processor seems fast enough :-)



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