Thanks for passing along this news.

The Palm has long been a natural Squeak target, but the low performance Dragonball processor made it unattractive. Worse, the Palm OS memory model made it difficult to get a single contiguous block of RAM in which to put Squeak's object heap. An ARM processor (StrongARM or otherwise) would address the first problem and I suspect that Palm would also address the second problem when they migrate to the new processor. Applications such as MP3 players and speech recognition would be difficult to write using the current Palm memory model, and I don't think ARM architecture offers any particular incentives to use small memory chunks the way the 68K architecture does.

Meanwhile, the new Compaq Aero based on the StrongARM sounds like it might make an excellent Squeak platform. There are pdf files at:

ftp://ftp.compaq.com/pub/products/handhelds/pocketpc.pdf ftp://ftp.compaq.com/pub/products/handhelds/famchart.pdf

-- John

At 12:58 PM -0700 4/28/00, John-Reed Maffeo wrote:

http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1006-200-1752075.html?dtn.head