Slashdot Mirror
GCC C/C++ Compiler Ported to WinCE
An anonymous reader writes "This interview at WindowsForDevices is with a young Russian programmer who earlier this year launched a project to port the open source GCC C/C++ compiler and supporting tools (library, manager, linker, etc.) to Windows CE and the Pocket PC platform. The result, according to Vitaliy Pronkin, the project's founder, is that it is now possible to develop applications directly on a Pocket PC PDA using the standard C/C++ programming language. Specifically, source code written in eVC (MFC isn't supported yet) can be built and then executed directly on the Pocket PC (or other Windows CE device) without conversion or additional runtimes. Find it, fix it, compile it, run it -- right on your Pocket PC!"
Umm, I doubt a POS port of GCC will be possible until at least POS 6. Unless someone wrote a new C compiler and just happened to also call it "GCC," there's about zilch chance of GCC ending up on POS. The OS is primitive, whereas WinCE and Linux for the PDA (both with gcc ports) are "real" OSes in most senses of the word. Make jokes about WinCE as you may, but it has real multitasking, decent memory management, etc. Can you imagine doing a port og GCC that manages to confine itself to the 64KB (in POS 5.2; older POS confined to 32KB!) chunk of continuous RAM that POS limits its apps to? Or how slow GCC would be if someone write a memory management compat library for POS (why hasn't anyone?) that emulated grabbing larger chunks of RAM by getting them all in 64KB chunks and shuffling it all? Molasses, man, molasses.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Woah, you're really off here.
Palm OS hasn't been limited to 64k blocks for several years now EXCEPT for resources. Palm OS 3.5 and later all support large allocations.