From: "Hal E. Fulton" <hal9000@...>
Date: 2002-04-21T03:12:51+09:00
Subject: Q: Possible Palm OS port?

Hello all,

Question for you. (More a matter of curiosity than
a practical matter...)

Several people have expressed interest in a port
of Ruby to the Palm OS...

Are there any thoughts on what it would take to 
make this work?

Disclaimer: I'm not qualified for the task. Not by 
myself, anyway.

Here are some preliminary thoughts of mine:

1. Size is a concern. The typical Palm is about
8 megs, I think. I suppose some functionality
would have to be removed. Some can be removed
easily such as Tk stuff, right?

2. File access and IO would be radically different,
I think... does the Palm even have the concept of
a "file"?

3. Isn't there a gcc version which cross-compiles
for the Palm? I know there's PocketC, but that's
not a true C compiler AFAIK.

4. I suppose there should be an add-on library to
interface to the rest of the Palm... a way to read
from the Memo app, a native GUI, and so on...

Anyone have ideas on this?

How many person-hours are we talking here, and
what are the major design decisions?

Hal Fulton