On 23 Mar 2005, at 18:56, Clint Jeffery wrote:
I have been meaning to have a proper look under the hood of Unicon
and
well a port to PalmOS would be a very positive thing
I agree, I would love to see this.
My main question would be whether (perhaps on newer versions of
PalmOS) there
is enough stack and heap memory available under Palm. If not, it
would be a
major undertaking to try and reduce Icon/Unicon's data requirements.
Browsing around the PalmOS developer documentation it appears that in
older versions of the operating system the stack is 4K, however
third-party tools existed that could extend this so I'm not sure how
hard and fast a limit that is. I also don't yet know if this applies
to the current PalmOS 5.x builds as Palm's developer documentation
isn't the clearest I've encountered.
Having spent several years in embedded systems 4K sounds awfully
generous to me (I've written for several platforms where that would've
been the entire available RAM), but I suspect that it might not be
that generous for a virtual machine (LispMe for example is a pretty
solid Scheme implementation that runs comfortably on PalmOS, but the
developer warns that using local variables in C extensions isn't a
very good idea).
More worrying, the only heap space estimates I've found apply to OS
3.5 and earlier, and state that for any machine with 4MB or more of
RAM the heap is 256Kb. Now I have used Icon in less than this -
version 5 on an 8086 laptop back in 1990! I find it hard to believe
that this limit can apply to PalmOS 5, if only because there is a
working port of the Quake engine. However until I can find something
definitive in Palm's documentation it's probably prudent to believe
the worst.
Given that PalmOS is running on 32-bit hardware, so memory footprint
should be similar to on an x86, what's the minimum stack and heap
space that you think Unicon needs to be ported successfully?
Eleanor
Senior Software Developer
Games With Brains
http://eleanor.goth-chic.org/
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