PalmIII Port ?

[Jose Orlando Pereira]

[I'm crossposting this message to the Ghost andf Kaffe lists, so I can be
 corrected if I'm wrong... ]

Jean-Baptiste Bugeaud wrote:
> What i can't understand for GhostVM is that it doesn't seem to be a VM !
> a VM is supposed to run on a platform and translate bytecode into native
> machine code.
> i may be wrong but Ghost seem only to allow connection to remove VM (what
> they call Ghost Server) that run on a PC computer.
> if this is right, it sound very bad.

Ghost is a *real* VM! The so called Ghost Server is currently just a bytecode 
optimizer, which is used mostly to reduce the required memory footprint
of class files before downloading them to the Pilot.

Besides that, runtime structures has been carefully optimized for low
memory comsumption in small apps (e.g. 4 byte pointers are replaced
by 1 byte handles).
 
> I'm personnaly interested in porting a "real" VM for the PalmOS, because i
> do think such a portable device will be very interresting !
> 
> As i'm a newby to kaffe, i've got some questions that stick me ...
> 
> what is required to port kaffe to a VM ?
> ie, what file (Headers ,C, ...) should i own/write?
> how link to the native GUI or Port GRX ?
> 
> What i know about PalmIII is that there is a GCC for it !

My personal (and humble) opinion is that a JIT compiler is not the best
choice for an environment with seriously constrained memory resources.
The path taken by Ghost (previously optimized bytecode), possibly in addition
to pre-compilation (which I believe is mentioned somewhere by Sean McDirmid
as a possible future task for the Ghost Server) seems to be the best choice.

-- 
Jose Orlando Pereira
* mailto:jop at di.uminho.pt * http://gsd.di.uminho.pt/~jop *