Re: Perl on Palm

[gregor42]

As far as running interpreted languages goes, I already have Hot Paw Basic running on my Palm 7x. So obviously even a very limited implementation would be possible. The issue is more one of SIZE, since we're talking about 8Mb TOTAL, including whatever scripts you want to run. Codewarrior is available for Palm to build C apps. (?C++?) Since a lot of PERL is written in C, it would seem that it would be POSSIBLE. But it also seems like it would be a lot of frustration. Looking at the footprint that PERL takes up on my workstation, storage-wise, with modules & all I think the real problem will be storage space. In this I think PocketPC's will have PERL long before Palm ever does.

[sierrathedog04]

Is the amount of available memory really the reason that there are no Palm ports of Perl? According to a 1998 article on "The Perl Machine" in The Perl Journal:

On conventional computers, Perl has a large 'footprint' - the compiler is often more than a megabyte, which can take a large fraction of a second to load into memory.

If the entire Perl compiler only has a memory footprint of a megabyte then it is hard for me to imagine that a port of Perl could not fit into four or five megabytes total.

That would still leave three or four megabytes of memory for everything else. Until recently Palm Pilots only came with 2MB of RAM, so I think that Perl-lovers would be able to squeeze their other applications into a few megabytes and still have room left for a fat four or five MB Perl for the Palm distribution.

I get the impression that what prevents a port of Perl is architecture-related, not memory-related. In addition to the perl source there is probably a lot of other C source code out there that does not port to the Palm for reasons that are related to the Palm OS.