I received the source code and will create a new module in the osx-palm-tools CVS asap. I have mixed feelings about using ObjC to develop on the Palm. I love Objective-C's messaging system, garbage collection and all around effectiveness but I'm not sure whether an ObjC runtime would really accomodate with Palm handheld's limited memory/cpu.
Message lookup can be quite expensive, even with hash-codes as it is being used today, and certainly as memory consuming as C++'s virtual tables. This can be a real problem on slow devices. Maybe not on the current generation of Palm OS 5 devices, but even there with the limited amount of heap available I have the feeling that some parts of the ObjC runtime may hinder the performance of applications.
Did you perform any kind of timings with your code? I know that it's really like comparing Apples and Oranges, it's just to get an idea.
Anyway, thanks for contributing this code! I don't know whether Obj-C on the Palm will trigger interest from more than a handful folks, but being a big fan of ObjC I can certainly appreciate your work.
Florent
On vendredi, f�v 21, 2003, at 17:35 Europe/Paris, Mark F Rodriguez wrote:
Florent,
I can appreciate your statements.
Quite honestly I wasn't sure if anyone would be interested and had the project sitting on my hard drive for over two years without being touched! That being said, I didn't want to invest too much time on packaging up files, documenting source and committing things to CVS or starting some sourceforge project with docs, detailed descriptions, etc; so what you see in the download was what was on my hard drive.
When the project was started my intentions were to release what was announced yesterday and keep the ObjC library a black box hence the shared library. Because of this, the files released yesterday had some docs and comments in the source already and I was able to just load the project in CW 8 and zip the files. On the other hand the other CW project for the ObjC library is not as "clean" and would require some "extra" work. There's really no other reason why the source for the ObjC library wasn't included except for this fact - nothing really top secret or anything:-)
The spirit behind releasing the project was to show that ObjC development on the Palm is possible and to see if other developers would show an interest. I'd love to see this develop further and will send you the source to the ObjC library offline.
Feel free to GPL the source and add it to your sourceforge osx-palm-tools.
Take care, -Mark
On Friday, February 21, 2003, at 10:15 AM, Florent Pillet wrote:
That would be cool if the source code to the lib was actually downloadable.
Right now, you make available a library without the source code, knowing that the lib certainly has memory problems and is probably not stable on recent platforms. Based on this, I don't see how anyone would want to use it for any kind of serious development..
Nice try, but without the source code I think you're not going to get many users / contributors ;-)
Why don't you make this a SourceForge project?
Florent
On jeudi, f�v 20, 2003, at 22:47 Europe/Paris, Mark F Rodriguez wrote:
This project was started back in late 1999 / early 2000 as a hobby just to see if I could get some variant of ObjC running on the Palm. With that in mind this is probably not meant for commercial applications where reliability and robustness are paramount. However, the xObjC library has been tested and seems to be pretty stable*. Of course that last statement in NO WAY grantees ANYTHING; therefore, use at your own risk.
You can download the project files from http://homepage.mac.com/xaplos/ where you'll see a download link on the left side of the page.
It's been a long while (almost two years now) since I've done anything with this project and thought others might be interested. The lower level ObjC support is written in assembler so don't try to run this on an ARM processor. If anyone wants the source / assembly to the ObjC library, please email me and I'll provide them with the following condition: If you make millions from the source, you'll give me my fair share!
Note that all development was done using CW 6 on a Mac (I've updated the CW files to CW 8 and also did an XML export). I tried to make it easy for all you "poor" Windows users by DeRezing all resources into *.r files but all line breaks are Mac line breaks. I've had the privilege of converting my share of files between dos and mac line breaks... have fun:-)
*Just before packaging these files for release, I decided to run the sample application with a 4.1 debug ROM and the Palm Emulator 3.5 which crashed because of a Bus Error. You can still see what the application is suppose to do, but the clean up routines which are written in assembly are obviously not playing well with others. The application "works" without crashing on non-debug ROMs and on several actual devices. I don't have the time to look into this issue, but others are welcome to.
Enjoy! -Mark
--
For information on using the Palm Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see http://www.palmos.com/dev/support/forums/
-- Florent Pillet, Code Segment [EMAIL PROTECTED] Developer tools and end-user products ICQ: 117292463 Palm, Mac, Unix, Windows http://perso.wanadoo.fr/fpillet
--
For information on using the Palm Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see http://www.palmos.com/dev/support/forums/
.
--
For information on using the Palm Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see http://www.palmos.com/dev/support/forums/
-- Florent Pillet, Code Segment [EMAIL PROTECTED] Developer tools and end-user products ICQ: 117292463 Palm, Mac, Unix, Windows http://perso.wanadoo.fr/fpillet
-- For information on using the Palm Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see http://www.palmos.com/dev/support/forums/
