dr_lambado has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:
Hello all, I seek your divine wisdom on the topic of porting perl to my brand new Handpring Visor Deluxe. I know that it has been mentioned before, but that was quite a long time ago but I have some aditional information.....
I have done a little research into programming on the Motorola Dragonball processor and the limitations/strengths of the PalmOS. Please bear in mind I have only about 3 months experiance with perl (I primarilly websurf and mess around with linux) and remember what your mother said: "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all".
But enough rambling. On the subject of porting perl to PalmOS I found a project on SourceForge about it initially I was disheartened at the homepage, but then I looked at the project summary which said that the project was created on the 21st June 2001 so this looks promising.
It has been mentioned before about porting perl to the PalmOS and some had said that it woulkd be very difficult. Which got me thinking how difficult would it be. The Dragonball is a 32bit chip (some stuff about the Dragonball here, an emulator here and the official page here) and there are dozens of cross compilers for porting c programs to the PalmOS. I found this which "consists of patches to binutils, gdb and GCC to support Palm OS, along with several post-linker tools" with a tutorial here. I also found this which basically tells you what PalmOS does and doesn't support when it comes to c. I don't know c so I can't tell you how useful this is/could be. There is also a zip with the a full set of FAQ's about programming for Palm here.
I am told that space is a problem with the palm devices. On the old Palm Pilots and Palm III's perhaps but my Handspring has 8MB of storage :) and even if this isn't enough (which I doubt, see below) the Visor takes Spingboard expansion modules (pdf whitepaper here) which include Compact Flash and Smart Media readers/writers which, I believe, can add up to 256Megs of storage to your Palm. Now considering that even my Windows perl distro is 32Megs, I think that this is ample space :). Also I found the Minix port of perl. This is only 923KB zipped (2.6Megs unzipped) which fits neatly into the 8Megs of space, still leaving room for swapping things in and out of memory.
Thats all I have at the moment. I took me about 4 days to find all the information and I dug up a lot of crap while I was doing it :). Some additional pages you might want to look at:
HandSpring Developers site
Work on a port of linux to the Palm series
The GNU PalmOS SDK
OnBoard C, a c compiler on your PalmOS device
You're probably reading this thinking "Why has he posted this here??" or "WTF is he talking about". Well I wanted to know what you think. Is it as impossible as you first thought? I am no hardcore ASM coder, I'm not even really a hardcore perl coder, I just want to be able to write scripts when I'm on the train/plane/in the car. Over the next few weeks I'm going to try out porting perl to my Palm, I'll report the results on my homenode. If anyone has any additional information that you think that I might find useful or wants to help me then reply or mail me
Incidently, this is my first postng to perlmonks and I'd just like to say mad props to vroom for a great site and to you guys here who help make it a good site
Thanks for your time and apologies for any spelling/grammer errors :)
The Evil But Fickle Dr Lambado
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