Supported architectures for D

[Chad J]

John Reimer wrote:
> On Thu, 17 Aug 2006 01:38:51 -0700, Chad J  
> <gamerChad at _spamIsBad_gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Wim Vander Schelden wrote:
>>
>>> I have noticed strange thing just below the surface of my screen as  
>>> well, they look like bubbles, and I have noticed the screens surface 
>>> is  very easily damaged (scratches etc) so lets just hope it doesn't 
>>> break  just yet. As for the responsiveness of palm os, sure, if you 
>>> use it for  its calendar and things like that it may be responsive, 
>>> but once you  use its wifi things go wrong :) I never used WM5, but 
>>> WM2k3 worked  nicely for me, albeit it often crashed. A friend of 
>>> mine owned a Dell  x50v, and it was bulky, power hungry and the UI 
>>> was dog ugly, way worse  than the simple WM2k3. Why didn't they just 
>>> stick their Windows XP  teletubbie skin (green-blue and a wallpaper 
>>> of a hill that looks like  its a screenshot from teletubbieland) on 
>>> it to make the torment  complete?
>>> That said, he API for software development is awful on a palm, its  
>>> something that should have been flagged "deprecated" a few decades 
>>> ago.  Thank god their switching to linux :)
>>>  /End of off-topic slandering of all PDA OS'es
>>>  - Wim
>>>
>>
>> So a Dell x50v with WM2k3 would be a decent choice (I'm thinking of  
>> getting one)?  I want the 480x640 res, and I want to be able to run my 
>> D  programs on it :)
>>
>> Yeah the palm API... this is why I am working on a WinCE port and not 
>> a  Palm port, and why I'm willing to give ARM-linux a shot but I'm 
>> not  going to touch palm until the game I want to write is completed.  
>> It  seems like a lot of extra work in Phobos making everything work 
>> with  palm, when they might just switch to linux soon.
> 
> 
> 
> It's true, Palm just isn't a choice.  While I liked it's responsiveness  
> and simple user interface, I agree with Wim that the programming 
> interface  was an embarassment: it was rediculously outdated and 
> horribly handicapped  despite new technology.  You couldn't take 
> advantage of the 32-bit ARM  without serious duct tape.  Neither could 
> you program outside of 64K  (32K?) because you were basically working 
> within the old Motorola emulator  limitations.  I don't mind seeing a 
> linux replacement on Palm... but Palm  has lost no matter what they do 
> now. It's a joke.  I doubt they can  recover from their fall seeing that 
> there are already several linux PDA  alternatives out there now.  
> Furhermore the PDA craze seems to already be  fading.
> 
> I don't like the WinCE programming interface either, which amounts to  
> win32 programming, but I certainly wouldn't mind programming on it if D  
> were available there.
> 
> -JJR

It is good for us that WinCE is similar to Win32, makes phobos much 
easier to port.  But Palm is similar to nothing.  I think there's a way 
around the 64kB limit using the FtrPtrNew function.  That still leaves 
emulating a file system, unless the Palm VFS can be used on the PDA's 
own RAM.  Also anything that isn't covered by the few POSIX functions 
that Palm seems to have exposed (<a 
href="http://www.palmos.com/dev/support/docs/dev_suite/CompilerRef/CompilerRef_RuntimeFunctions.html">link</a>) 
will need to be handled with fresh phobos code.  oh joy.

I haven't heard of that ARM limitation.  That sounds scary too.  What 
does it use by default instead of 32 bit ARM code?