On Fri, Jan 04, 2002 at 04:54:20PM +1100, Michael Glickman wrote:
> On the web I found references to Metrowerks Code Warrior for ARM, and GNU
> development tools for ARM
The GNU toolchain already targets ARM at least as well as it targets
m68k. (The ARM port is more modern than the m68k port, which was one of
the original GCC ports, hence "at least as well".)
Similarly, CodeWarrior already targets the architecture too.
> but in both cases there is no apparent relation to PalmOS.
Of course, what a native ARM Palm OS runtime might look like is another
question.
> (will we get rid of multi-segment nightmare ?),
(Insert brain here...)
The fundamental limitation on code section size is the distance
achievable in a relative jump. (Because on Palm OS code is both
read-only and movable, you have to use position independent code, and
for sanity that implies using native relative branch instructions.)
A m68k Dragonball only has a +/- 32K relative jump. An ARM (in ARM
mode) has a +/- 32 Mb relative jump.
Thus if and when Palm OS programmers are building native ARM apps, even
if application code in such an environment must still be read-only and
movable, I anticipate that splitting single executables into multiple
code resources will no longer be an important technique.
Of course, such a grand state of affairs will require the lifting of
the other relevant limitation: the 64K resource size limit in Hotsync.
Hopefully Palm will be able to get this done in time. :-)
John
--
For information on using the Palm Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see
http://www.palmos.com/dev/tech/support/forums/
