Tim,

While EPOC was more or less abandoned, Symbian OS, which basically still 
is EPOC32 lives on in many models of Nokia handsets.  I think 
Sony-Erikksen has some symbian based models as well.  If Symbian is to be 
believed, there are 41 models available from eight different 
manufacturers, so it's not necessarily pointless, especially since Symbian 
all but killed OPL.

The biggest problem I saw with porting to EPOC32 was that a compliant 
application is built as a DLL and can therefore have no global variables, 
and at the time I was looking, the Squeak VM needed some work to get to 
this state.  It might be easier now with the work John McIntosh did to 
move most of the globals into a single structure.  It's that bloody C++ 
focus that Psion chose to go with that led to this.  They really want 
applications to be C++ classes that you instantiate to launch the app.

They did have an equivalent of libc to support legacy apps, but I think 
using it had a negative impact on your ability to use OS services that 
were not included in their libc, like oh, say the whole user interface 
infrastructure (eikon, etc).

                -Dean






Tim Rowledge <tim at sumeru.stanford.edu>
Sent by: squeak-dev-bounces at lists.squeakfoundation.org
04/11/2005 07:21 PM
Please respond to The general-purpose Squeak developers list

 
        To:     squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org
        cc: 
        Subject:        Re: [Q] Squeak on Symbian


âÁÓËÁËÏ× äÁÎÉÉÌ <daniq at inbox.ru> wrote:

> Is it possible to run Squeak (or other Smalltalk) on Symbian? Are there 
> any live projects? Is it difficult to build VM and prepare image by 
myself?
> Thanx...
I was attempting this but gave up since EPOC was effectively killed. There 
was
a partially successful VM for the Psion 5 clamshell PDA but I never 
managed to
make it work myself.

Porting is not generally terribly difficult if the OS has fairly 
'ordinary'
facilities. If it is odd, or lacks things common to desktop OSs it gets a
little harder _unless_ it is really bare in which case it can actually be
easier. This is because there is less awkward OS to get in the way.

The worst part of my attempts to do any EPOC work was the horrible 
development
environment.

tim
--
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
Strange OpCodes: PBC: Print and Break Chain



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