Use Perl to port Windows DLLs to Palm OS

developerWorks writes "Porting existing Windows DLLs to Palm OS has historically been a tedious process. This article introduces you to an interesting technique that makes this process easier by using Perl. It demonstrates a Perl script that analyzes existing C source code and automatically generates many of the source files required for porting. You should be able to use the code outlined in the article to help with your own porting projects."

Comments

And why?

[andfarm]

When was the last time anybody needed to port a Windows DLL to PalmOS? I can't think of many libraries that would be used on both Windows and PalmOS --- the two have completely different interfaces and OS architectures, AFAIK.

Somebody slap me if I'm wrong, though.

Re:And why?

[agnosonga]

I can't think of many libraries that would be used on both Windows and PalmOS

looks kinda like their porting Math libraries
however, you would think that PalmOS aleady had math libraries

Somebody slap me if I'm wrong, though.

I just slapped you, and I still don't understand why

Re:And why?

[jalilv]

There are times when you have an application running on Windows (and not necessarily PocketPC) that you need to port to run on Palm OS. Anyone who has done this even for a smaller code base knows the pain of doing this. An application on Windows may have a main executable and a bunch of DLLs. The article shows how to convert the DLLs to Palm Shared libraries and can be very useful for small and large projects equally. Lot of companies are allowing their employees to use the handhelds of their choice. In such situations you need to port your applications to PocketPC, Palm, Blackberry, add your favourite PDA here.

- Jalil Vaidya

I have one question.

[BoomerSooner]

Why?

If you've chosen PocketPC over Palm why would you switch? Kind of like going from Windows to DOS.

Plus the UI components will not work at all. So simply copy/pasting your code to CodeWarrior from the Embedded Tools would work (assuming you tried to keep it close to compatible, again why?).

The hardest thing for me as a developer is the logic, not the code. Hell with good design documents and a well thought out plan the code is almost secondary.

Writing portable code

[cpeterso]

I don't think writing Perl scripts to munge your C sources is a very safe or easy to maintain design. Everyone knows that different systems have different APIs and "quirks". I think the Linux kernel takes an interesting approach to portable code. C macros (#defines and #ifdefs) are only allowed in header files, so the C source files for the core code are exactly the same for all platforms. All the platform-specific quirks and macro workarounds are isolated to header files specific to just that platform's arch directories.

The other way

[Penguin]

Now we just need to be able to use Windows DLLs to port perl to PalmOS!

(... or whatever it would take to port perl to PalmOS)

Math libraries

[andfarm]

In fact, I'm sure the Palm already has math libraries of some sort --- I've currently got MathLib on mine, though I don't know what IBM is trying to do. Perhaps something MathLib doesn't?