The whole m68k/PACE/PNO thing seems to be a giant kludge. I can understand PACE so that legacy apps from previous PalmOS generations still work, but forcing ALL new programs to be m68k too? Strange to me.
OS 5 was originally seen as a stopgap OS that let existing programs work on ARM hardware. The designers didn't expect it to be around for three years; they thought the world would move to Palm OS Cobalt much more quickly. Knowing what was coming in Cobalt, they didn't want to support an ARM native application model because it would be incompatible with Cobalt, so they only allowed in-ROM applications to be ARM native, and that's using a kludgy internal-only API without global variable access and requiring module IDs that have to be allocated by PalmSource.
The PNO model was a fairly late-in-development change to OS 5 to allow a not-very-easy way for speed-sensitive applications to use ARM code directly.
-- Ben Combee, Senior Software Engineer, palmOne, Inc. "Combee on Palm OS" weblog: http://palmos.combee.net/ Developer Forum Archives: http://news.palmos.com/read/all_forums/ -- For information on using the PalmSource Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see http://www.palmos.com/dev/support/forums/
