Porting Lemmings In 36 Hours

An anonymous reader writes "Aaron Ardiri challenged himself to port his classic PalmOS version of Lemmings to the iPhone, Palm Pre, Mac, and Windows. The porting was done using his own dev environment, which creates native C versions of the game. He liveblogged the whole thing, and finished after only 36 hours with an iPhone version and a Palm Pre version awaiting submission, and free versions for Windows and Mac available on his site."

Comments

Re:Nice accomplishment!

[Junior J. Junior III]

Yeah, and it is, but it's still considered "low level" these days because it's awfully darn close to the metal. As compared to stuff like .NET or Java that runs on virtual machines or Common Language Runtimes.

Re:Wrong language?

[Graff]

Didn't Apple have some anti-competitive rules that allowed only Objective-C to be used in programming for the iPhone?

Objective-C is C. Objective-C is a strict superset of C so there's no difference between C code and Objective-C except for the extensions that Objective-C has added.

Even if Objective-C didn't include all of C it would still be OK. Apple allows iOS apps to be written in Objective-C, C, and C++. These languages were chosen because they are supported under Apple's API for iOS.

Re:Nice accomplishment!

[TheRaven64]

Factually wrong. LLVM is a virtual machine in the sense of virtual architecture, not in the sense of virtual environment. Code for the iPhone is first compiled to LLVM intermediate representation (IR), which is machine code for a virtual architecture that has an infinite number of single-assignment registers and a structured (but simple) memory model. You can do various things with code in this form, but when you are targeting the iPhone, you generally run some optimisations, link a load of the modules together, run some more optimisations, and then compile the result to native code.

Describing LLVM as not unlike the JVM or CLR is like saying that Pascal is not unlike Smalltalk.