Codewarrior for PalmOS v9 came in this mornings UPS delivery. I tried to install it on an ancient win98 laptop. The first problem was the IDE said that something called odbc32.dll was missing. After about an hour of rummaging around on the web, I managed to find something on Microsoft's website that claimed to install this DLL. Then I had to reinstall Codewarrior again before it the IDE would launch without another error message.
Next I tried moving a couple armlets over to using the new v9 compiler. This was pretty painless. I just had to change the main _start function name and they compiled without any other problems. It took me awhile to figure out why my armlets were misnumbered when I built my test application. Turns out their linker requires than you name the .bin files with armcXXXX where XXXX is the hex conversion of the resource number, and I was still using decimal. I decided to try their new PalmOS linker, which required making a couple new targets to convert the Constructor .rsrc files into .ro files. The IDE required a restart before these .ro files would build without an error message. Then I had to add the .ro files to the app project and move them into the last segment. The pdf documents were not readable on a Mac directly from the CD-ROM. I had to do a full install on the laptop, and then ftp the documentation back to the Mac where I could read them. The documentation needs editing. In a list of about 40 steps to configure some linker, it mixes the 5 important settings in with dozens of "click here", "click there" and "click OK" items. Their armlet runtime includes a set of floating point operations that the linker will strip if you don't use them. This floating point runtime appears to be around 4 to 4.5 times faster then the floating point emulation built into OS 5. The initial measurement was 1.08 double precision megaflops on my Mandlebrot benchmark. Very nice. Happy Holidays, Ron Nicholson HotPaw <http://www.hotpaw.com/rhn/hotpaw> -- For information on using the Palm Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see http://www.palmos.com/dev/support/forums/
