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PalmOS Support

 [1/16] from: brucej:spindance at: 23-May-2001 14:32


I have seen references to REBOL running on Palm OS dating from 1999, but not since. Can anyone fill me in on the current state of Palm OS support in REBOL? Is it in the future? Did it ever exist? If so, why was it dropped? Is there an older release available which will run on Palm OS? Thanks, Bruce ------------------------------ Bruce Jarvis Senior Consultant SpinDance, Inc. 603 E. 16th Street Holland, MI 49423 Phone: 616-355-7000 ex. 23 Mobile: 616-317-6940 [brucej--spindance--com] http://www.spindance.com

 [2/16] from: ryanc:iesco-dms at: 23-May-2001 12:29


Well, to much dismay, it doesnt even rank on the platform list. I think RT might get around to it someday, but the official stance is there wont be a Palm port. There is alot of platform issues. A possible option is running rebol through the uclinux port for the Palm... but it is still in development. Most unfortuneately, right now CE is the way. --Ryan Bruce Jarvis wrote:
> I have seen references to REBOL running on Palm OS dating from 1999, but not > since.
<<quoted lines omitted: 19>>
> [rebol-request--rebol--com] with "unsubscribe" in the > subject, without the quotes.
-- Ryan Cole Programmer Analyst www.iesco-dms.com 707-468-5400 I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world. -Einstein

 [3/16] from: holger:rebol at: 23-May-2001 13:53


On Wed, May 23, 2001 at 02:32:59PM -0400, Bruce Jarvis wrote:
> I have seen references to REBOL running on Palm OS dating from 1999, but not > since. > > Can anyone fill me in on the current state of Palm OS support in REBOL?
On hold for now. Palm devices are currently too limited for REBOL. Not enough RAM and limitations in the way the operating system is laid out. -- Holger Kruse [holger--rebol--com]

 [4/16] from: schaeper:hyperverse at: 23-May-2001 22:38


Just a thought on this. Are we talking about development or runtime? 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. Forth can do this, see http://www.quartus.com/products/forth a Forth environment for Palm. And you can develop directly on the Palm. Is Palm too limited for Rebol, or is Rebol too limited for Palm? I find it hard to imagine that a product as resource efficient as Rebol cannot find their way into a Palm. Everyone else is. The marketing answer is: Lead, Follow, or get out of the way Thanks for you attention Tom

 [5/16] from: kenneth:nwinet at: 23-May-2001 21:20


Hi Tom, The company I work for produces palm software for one of our products and I've always had an interest in forth. But it seems to be a bad link.
> Are we talking about development or runtime? 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. Forth can do this, see
http://www.quartus.com/products/forth
> a Forth environment for Palm. And you can develop directly on the Palm.
Thanks, Ken.

 [6/16] from: kolla:nvg:ntnu:no at: 24-May-2001 5:54


On Wed, 23 May 2001, Tom Schaeper wrote:
> I find it hard to imagine that a product as resource efficient as Rebol > cannot find their way into a Palm. Everyone else is.
*cough cough cough.. * Resource efficient?! What on earth gave you that impression? Have you tried rebol on amiga, even a fast one? For what it´s worth.. if you need to scribble code on palm, there´s the pippy python implementation. -- kolla

 [7/16] from: petr:krenzelok:trz:cz at: 24-May-2001 6:17


> I find it hard to imagine that a product as resource efficient as Rebol > cannot find their way into a Palm. Everyone else is. >
I am not sure Rebol is resource efficient. 500Kb size of executable doesn't mean Rebol is not unpacked or memory hungry. I remember some earlier View memory test and I am not sure we were not talking 25 MB memory usage with some scripts. It would be fine if someone could do some measurements for Core and View, but I am scarred of Rebol being "Mozilla" amongst scripting languages. We also loose in compiler arena, but I don't know how are/aren't other scripting environments compilable ... -pekr-

 [8/16] from: schaeper:hyperverse at: 23-May-2001 23:32


Silly me, I should have cut-and-pasted- the link http://www.quartus.net/products/forth/

 [9/16] from: petr:krenzelok:trz:cz at: 24-May-2001 6:54


Petr Krenzelok wrote:
> > I find it hard to imagine that a product as resource efficient as Rebol > > cannot find their way into a Palm. Everyone else is.
<<quoted lines omitted: 4>>
> scripts. > It would be fine if someone could do some measurements for Core and View,
replying to my own script - DocKimbel has some interesting script at: http://rebol.dhs.org/mem-watch.r run some script and then just type "mem-watch" in console ... -pekr-

 [10/16] from: holger:rebol at: 23-May-2001 22:12


On Wed, May 23, 2001 at 10:38:58PM -0500, Tom Schaeper wrote:
> Just a thought on this. > > Are we talking about development or runtime?
Runtime.
> 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. -- Holger Kruse [holger--rebol--com]

 [11/16] 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
<<quoted lines omitted: 5>>
> 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

 [12/16] from: kenneth:nwinet at: 23-May-2001 22:49


Thanks for the link Tom. They've made it as an onboard application which is a bad idea for a developer (we may not like keyboards but they are productive.) Besides which, the Palm is not really a hardened product. It doesn't wear well and is easily abused. We sell a hardened version and one of our saleman still managed to crack the screen on one the first day he got it in his hands. ;-) So if Rebol did get implemented for the Palm I would hope they would not forgo a pc emulator and cross compiler. Although, I'm not sure how the Rebol paradigm would fit that environment.
>It seems that the majority of Palm developers develop on a Pc and then >cross-compile and download to the Palm.
Which I suspect will always be the case.
> I am having trouble understanding why a REBOL runtime cannot run in > 8Mb of memory. Forth can do this, http://www.quartus.net/products/forth/
Thanks again, Ken.

 [13/16] from: ryanc:iesco-dms at: 24-May-2001 9:38


Forth, hehehe. Name something Forth doesn't run on. I have used Quartus Forth, its pretty good. You should know Lisp and SmallTalk are available as well. The Lisp interpeter, called LispMe, is similiar to rebol, but it was not dummy proof. I will be keeping an eye out for future versions though. SmallTalk is supposed to be dummy proof, but well, I will just say I haven't got the hang of it yet. Some of my stuff is written in Satellite Forms, but I recommend it only for simple data oriented applications. In my non-expert opinion, I think that generally C is the way for any serious Palm programmng right now, and I dont like C very much. You might check these out anyway: http://www.pocketsmalltalk.com/ http://www.lispme.de/lispme/index.html An earlier suggestion of mine was a light weight version of rebol for such devices as palms, cell phones, toasters, and bedroom appliances. I am sure RT has already thought of it, probably a longterm plan. --Ryan Tom Schaeper wrote:
> Just a thought on this. > Are we talking about development or runtime? It seems that the majority of
<<quoted lines omitted: 38>>
> [rebol-request--rebol--com] with "unsubscribe" in the > subject, without the quotes.
-- Ryan Cole Programmer Analyst www.iesco-dms.com 707-468-5400 I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world. -Einstein

 [14/16] from: belymt:saunalahti:fi at: 25-May-2001 3:13


At 22:12 23.5.2001 -0700, you wrote:
>On Wed, May 23, 2001 at 10:38:58PM -0500, Tom Schaeper wrote: > > It seems that the majority of
<<quoted lines omitted: 5>>
>Supporting that would be an enormous amount of work and slow REBOL down >by an order of magnitude.
Another issue is that many palms not yet have 8MB and even on those that do it's not usually free for one program (however great) as there are other uses to Palm than just Rebol. Using even 1 meg is IMHO bit inpolite. And yes.. PalmOS memory handling is a bit strange.. (I've done some programming to it with Quartus myself on my Palm V. Excellent program and nice way to code natively) That memory handling is optimized for minimal memory use and limited memory protection and it't not optimal for programs Rebol size. Perhaps if Rebol engine had been written differently from scratch.. But it's IMHO more likely that Palm's get newer OS and Processors released before that will happen. Joanna

 [15/16] from: agem:crosswinds at: 25-May-2001 2:16


>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Ursprüngliche Nachricht <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
Am 24.05.01, 05:54:25, schrieb Petr Krenzelok <[Petr--Krenzelok--trz--cz]> zum Thema [REBOL] Re: PalmOS Support:
> Petr Krenzelok wrote: > > > I find it hard to imagine that a product as resource efficient as
Rebol
> > > cannot find their way into a Palm. Everyone else is. > > > > > > > I am not sure Rebol is resource efficient. 500Kb size of executable
doesn't
> > mean Rebol is not unpacked or memory hungry. I remember some earlier
View
> > memory test and I am not sure we were not talking 25 MB memory usage
with some
> > scripts. > > > > It would be fine if someone could do some measurements for Core and
View,
> replying to my own script - DocKimbel has some interesting script at: > http://rebol.dhs.org/mem-watch.r > run some script and then just type "mem-watch" in console ...
[rebol[] view layout[ mem-watch: field green rate 1 feel [ engage: func [face a e] [face/text: reform [system/stats / 1024 "KB"] show face] ] with [append init [size: size * 3x1 / 5x1] ] ] ] :) Volker

 [16/16] from: kenneth:nwinet at: 24-May-2001 20:56


Hi Joanna, ----- Original Message ----- From: "Joanna Kurki":
> Another issue is that many palms not yet have 8MB and even on those that
do
> it's not usually free for one program (however great) as there are other > uses to Palm than just Rebol. Using even 1 meg is IMHO bit inpolite.
In the case of the company I work for, we resell the palm with only our application on it. So being polite is not our biggest concern :-) Having a capability is all we really concern ourselves with. However, I can see your point. Regards, Ken.

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