[squeak-dev] [Pharo-project] cog vm for iOS

Chris Cunnington smalltalktelevision at gmail.com
Fri May 27 00:09:38 UTC 2011


>About Android: A Squeak version by Andreas Raab (proof of concept)
>made it to the market, but seems to be unmaintained. Is there any
>information, about how it was done, what the caveats are and how this
>might leverage smalltalk development on Android?

http://code.google.com/p/squeak-android-vm/

I bought a Xoom on Monday and downloaded Squeak onto it from Android Market. It works. It's very small. And there's no keyboard. There
is no Squeak on the Apple App Store and likely will never be. I'm beyond caring at this point.

You need to download the Android SDK and then because you're building a non-Java app you need to download the NDK (N for Native.)
All of this is built into Eclipse.

Andreas provides all the files you load into the NDK/jni compiling suite. You get a set of vm C files for compiling. He wrote one
that bridges to Android called squeakvm.c. Then you compile a file called libsqueakvm.so.

He's included an image, which for reasons I haven't reached yet has been sliced into 12 1M pieces. He also wrote some Java files, which
act as a wrapper between Android and Squeak. They handle the Android "Aspect" and "Intent" or something. I just got the books so it's a
bit hazy.

Oh, the Dalvik debugger is essential. And RFB is used for some reason I can't fathom yet. And development happens using an
emulator provided by the Android SDK. Whether I'm supposed to build or find the device description (the AVD - for Android Virtual
Device) at this point that describes the Xoom, I'm not sure.

It's a pretty fun exploration. Now you know all I do. Really, I just want to make the screen bigger. That's related to this in squeakvm.c:

sqInt ioScreenSize(void) {
	return ( 800<<  16 ) | (600)
	}

I have no idea how a left bit shift produces a screen size near the 300x200 pixels that I get on my Xoom. But if I knew what I was doing
I wouldn't do it.

Chris





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