Not sure what to call this, but here goes.
I am one of the developers of Pocket Smalltalk, a version of Smalltalk that
runs on Palm OS (see www.pocketsmalltalk.com). I am in the middle of
designing a debugger for this, such that I can run the app on the device and
debug on the pc. Currently the cycle for debugging code is as follows:
- write code on pc
- package on pc
- load in poser
- stack trace on poser
- find code on pc
- modify and return to step 1
I would like to be able to debug and modify code at the same time.
Currently, I have an emulator for the Smalltalk VM, but not for the Palm OS
calls. I really do not want to have to build a Palm OS emulator as well.
One of the ideas I have is to do the following, have a stub in Poser or the
physical device. This stub would simply take all events coming in and send
them to my debugger, where the Smalltalk emulator would kick in. The stub
would also receive incoming calls to Palm OS functions (systraps) and
execute them and return the result. I'm not sure I am explaining this in
enough detail. But I basically want to run my code on the pc (not in poser
or device) that can affect the state of poser or the physical device.
I was wondering if anyone can think of anything wrong with this. Other than
why the hell bother, or what the hell are you doing. One issue I can think
of is that under Windows programming there are timing issues with responding
to certain types of events. Is there the same type of issue with Palm OS ?
If so, is there something I can use in Poser that reduces this issue ? Any
other issues anyone can think of ?
My other option is to simply have a debug version of my Smalltalk VM that
can talk to the PC and provide variable info, provide step functionality,
and modification of code while debugging. This would be good and all, but I
think the stub approach would be easier to do.
