Squeak History

Tim Rowledge tim at sumeru.stanford.edu
Mon Mar 17 20:00:12 UTC 2003


Aaron J Reichow <reic0024 at d.umn.edu> wrote:

> Because on the pilot, even when there is 2, 4 or even 32 MB of RAM, you
> can't get at it in continuous blocks.  I think only in 32K blocks.  (IIRC)
> You *could* do a full-scale Smalltalk on a Palm, but you'd be doing a lot
> more than a port of Squeak, you'd have to write a new VM to account for
> the way PalmOS works.
Actually, now that I think of it again I recall being told not too long
ago that there is in fact a way to get 'below' the memory structure
somehow such that it seemed likely that to be possible to do a sensible
port. Unfortunately the HandSpring guy that told me about this has now
moved on somewhere else and I can't find him.

My intended point was that we seem to have forgotten how to manage with
tiny machines. I'm sitting here at a 200MHz high performance descendant
of the feeble 8MHz ARM cpu I used for the Active Book and the
interactive performance is nowhere near as good. Ok, we're running 16bit
colour instead of monochrome and the Squeak vm is not as clever as the
Brouhaha one, but it really ought to be at least as good.

tim

-- 
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
Strange OpCodes: BFP: Blow Front Panel



More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list