[REBOL] Re: PalmOS Support
From: jeff:rebol at: 23-May-2001 22:45
> > It seems that the majority of Palm developers develop on
> > a Pc and then cross-compile and download to the Palm. I
> > am having trouble understanding why a REBOL runtime
> > cannot run in 8Mb of memory.
>
> The problem is that those 8 MB are not directly
> addressable. Less than 100 kB are, everything else has to
> go through memory management libraries. Supporting that
> would be an enormous amount of work and slow REBOL down by
> an order of magnitude.
To support my collegue here: This question comes up a lot
because people assume that REBOL should be on Palm because
REBOL's a wee little binary, I suppose. There's only 32k of
dynamic RAM on the Palm, though, memory you can have using
malloc. The naked truth is that even with the greatest, most
super-dooper optimized virtual memory system implemented
internally for REBOL, the poor guy would still spend more
time moving memory than being an interpreter. REBOL was
built with modern PC architectures in mind. Developing for
the Palm is literally like developing for an Apple ][e with
a big hard drive. (Hey -- my Apple ][ had an external 20 meg
Sider!)
-jeff
