[kaffe] Compiling Kaffe on Arm for Windows Mobile

[Dalibor Topic]

Mario Latronico wrote:
> I work on cygwin and i'm using CeGCC, a cross-development tools for Windows CE
> 
> Has anyone a suggestion on how to compile Kaffe for Arm / Windows Mobile 5.0 ?

the configuration is not supported yet. I've done some work to make GNU 
Classpath build using CeGCC, but I haven't started working on a Kaffe 
port yet.

> If this is a configuration not supported, do you think a porting will
> be too complex ?

Not really. Basically, you'd creare the config/arm/wince directory, copy 
over some files from another arm port, and modify them according to the 
porting guide to get Kaffe working.

In order to make the work more useable, I'd suggest using libffi, rather 
then writing a Kaffe-specific system call method implementation. Libffi 
itself does not have a CeGCC port, but there is a patch for libffi for 
arm-wince by theller, see
  http://sourceware.org/ml/libffi-discuss/2008/msg00009.html for 
details. It would require porting over from MSVC ARM assembler syntax to 
CeGCC, but that shouldn't be too hard. Libffi comes with a nice little 
test suite, so that you'd have a reasonable idea whether your ABI 
implementation actually works, as you port the code over.

The other important parts are threads (you may be able to reuse the 
threading implementation from Kaffe CE, suitably tweaked), and AWT, in 
case you care about running graphical applications. A good source for 
Windows CE AWT peers would be MySaifu, or PhoneME. Alternatively, if you 
are in for a challenge, you could try making the Classpath Qt AWT peers 
work, and then making them work on Windows CE using the Qt port to WinCE.

cheers,
dalibor topic