From:  Dean Swan at MITEL on 10/03/2000 03:49 PM

>>   existing code to EPOC.  Am I missing something?  I'm sure I could be
>>   since the EPOC documentation is "a little" hard to follow.
>Tell me about it. Ever tried installing the SDK? The older ones required
>that you install a particular version of PERL (even if you already had
>PERL installed) in order to run an install program that was effectively
>'cp -R blahblah' ! Oh, and only to particular directories on the c:
>drive.

Yeah.  I just installed the ER5 C++ SDK on my wife's Mac (ok, so under
VirtualPC/Win98) on a drive image file that gets mounted as D:.  The
installer now lets you optionally skip the PERL installation and you
can select C: or D:, but that's it.  It still does the directories as
it sees fit.

>Extremely good would be my suspicion. And as Jecel pointed out, a 33-ish
>486 would be about the same.

Well, I don't have a 486/33 available, but I have run Squeak 2.7 on my
486DX2/50 Thinkpad, and it isn't bad.  Since the DX2/50 uses a 25 MHz bus,
with the CPU clocked at 50 MHz, would this work out to about the same
performance as a 486/33?


>requires removing the static variables (i.e., I don't have to rewrite the
>interpreter as a C++ program except for a trivial "jacket") which may turn
>out to be useful for other platforms anyway.

Oooh!  I forgot about this.  When EPOC says C++, it really means it (i.e. no
extern "C" blahBlahBlah() ).  As much as this whole "no static" variables
concept really hurts my head, I suspect it is a major part of the reason why
Winblowze crashes with great regularity and EPOC doesn't.


>Even going directly to the hardware is a problem, if you were thinking that
>way - besides, I'd like it to work on Tim's Netbook in addition to my S5, so
>it should be constructed as a more-or-less well-behaved EPOC app.  I won't
>have to worry about fonts, cut-and-paste, keyboard decoding and pen input,
>either.  And, if Tim likes Squeak on the Netbook, it would be easier to
>convince my wife to let me buy one.

I wasn't thinking of going straight to the hardware, although I do have a
"spare"
(for some reason, I can only get them to last 2 years before the display
 goes "flaky", as in dim or black streaks in various columns unless you
 push on the housing "just-so") S5 that I could use for that now.

I am on the verge of getting another portable, and my top choices right now
are the NEC MobilePro 880, and the Series 7.  I know I would be happy with an
S7, but the MP880 has that 800x600x16bit screen, and USB (and at least one
USB floppy drive is supported! - if it supports the USB Zip250 CD/RW we have
on the Mac, I would be *very* happy).

Anyways, If you want any assistance with the EPOC port, I may be able to offer
some time.  I have Squeak on my Casio E-105, but it just isn't "satisfying" the
way the S5 is.  I've written *lots* of code in OPL just because it's easy to do
just about anywhere.  I've even "converted" some DSP assembly code to OPL with
instruction level correspondence just so I could debug the code "on the go".

I've also had silly thoughts of substituting an OPL code generator in Squeak
just because it would be fairly simple to generate an OPL based Squeak VM,
but I suspect that the performance would be pretty awful.

                                   -Dean