You know, the alternate point of view is that Palm was really smart to design it this way and it's still a good idea.

This limitation isn't any more crazy than the limitations with "soups" on the Newton, and let's face it - Palm OS and Newton OS devices crash far less often than WinCE devices.  I would say that Psion did a good job with EPOC in managing the tradeoffs.  EPOC allows large allocations, AND i've never had a crash on my 5 MX.

I've been thinking about Squeak on Palm OS more lately since I've seen information about the AlphaSmart Dana (www.alphasmart.com), which is essentially a Palm OS 4.1 laptop with a 560x160 LCD, a full size keyboard, and it's NOT a clamshell design.  I'm kind of thinking of it as a Model 100/NEC PC8201a for the 21st century.  Now if they'd make a version that divides each of the physical dimensions by 2 it would make a pretty nice handheld too.

Anyway, my thoughts are along the lines of LOOM.  ObjectMemory is really the only class that should have to be mucked with much to implement a Squeak VM that essentially lets the image live on "disk" or some other storage medium (i.e. SD card, MMC, etc.) and work within a small physical memory.  After all, FLASH cards today are considerably faster than disk drives of 20 years ago, so while Squeak on this sort of architecture wouldn't be as fast as we've gotten used to, it could still be quite worthwhile.

						-Dean


-----Original Message-----
From: Aaron J Reichow [mailto:reic0024 at d.umn.edu]
Sent: Thursday, October 10, 2002 4:44 PM
To: squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org
Subject: Re: Squeak on Palm OS 5?


On Tue, 8 Oct 2002, Tommy Thorn wrote:

> Palm was really short sighted when they defined PalmOS.

It starts to look more like something a little more than short-sightedness
when they still impose these limits on an OS that is otherwise quite a
major revision.  Imagine if Apple decided that automatic memory management
really was just a joke played on CS students, and "fixed" OS X so that you
would have to specify how much RAM to allocate to each application. :)

Regards,
Aaron

  Aaron Reichow  ::  UMD ACM Pres  ::  http://www.d.umn.edu/~reic0024/
  "the end of the human race will be that it will eventually
      die of civilization. "                          :: r. w. emerson