On Thursday 17 February 2005 10:20 am, Blake wrote:
> Anyone done Squeak on the Zire?

No, and it's unlikely that anyone would want to unless they were a masochist.

However, I heard a rumor that IBM Almaden Labs did a Squeak port for the Palm 
OS (3?) a while ago. Anyone know more about this?

I'd love to have such a thing, as would a number of other people I know. Steve 
just got a Tapwave Zodiac, and Dan just got a Treo 650.

The memory "management" is ... interesting ... there's no guarantee that you 
can get a single block of database memory that's big enough for a Squeak 
image. In fact, I believe (could be wrong here) that the max size of a 
database record is just less than 64K in size. Squeak assumes a single 
contiguous chunk of memory in which it can put 32-bit pointers that will 
remain valid through a session. There are also "resource" chunks, but it 
doesn't seem to make much sense to copy the entire Squeak image from RAM 
(database) into RAM (resource) just to run it.

Also, the ARM-based Palms are actually emulating 68K processors much of the 
time when running 3rd-party code, though you can make individual native ARM 
code subroutines ("ARMlets") that you can call via a thunk of some kind. 
interpret() and friends would be a candidate for this treatment.

Anyone know more about Palm OS 4 or 5 memory management?

-- 
Ned Konz
http://bike-nomad.com/squeak/