W3C as letters on 3 plastic buttons from a keyboard

Event, Location, Month Year

Why is this interesting?

Porting Lua is Nothing New

Lua has been ported to many different systems from various desktop OSes to embedded systems to PDAs to the TI89 calculator.

The Palm platform offers some interesting challenges in porting.
A handy platform for noodling.
Lots of ideas for scriptable Palm apps
I'm not clever enough to be a good Forth programmer

Lua and PDAs

In particular, Lua runs on many handhelds already:

Pocket PC
EPOC (Symbian)
TI89
Nintendo DS(?)
Playstation (sort of)
...and...
PalmOS

(4 different projects, no less)

PalmOS Porting Projects

Lua for PalmOS, LuaForge, José Machado

(This project has an alpha-2 release on 12 July 2004.)

Lua for PalmOS (Cobalt), LuaForge, Guilherme Oliveira

(Just started. More to say on this one later.)

Palm Os Lua, Sourceforge, Victor Bogado da Silva Lins and Marco Catunda

(Never left the starting gate.)

Plua, Yahoo! Groups, Márcio Migueletto de Andrade

(The most mature but not open source.)

Why another PalmOS project?

Plua is quite good, but not open source.

Have to depend on someone else's development schedule.
No ability to tinker with core implementation choices.

There is a good chance that I'll merge my code with José Machado's.

PalmOS throughout history.

Large user base for version 3.0/3.5 up
Various optional capabilities.

Hi-res, multiple versions.
DIA

Garnet and the move to ARM

Palm Native Objects (PNO)

Cobalt

The future of the PalmOS.

PalmOS becomes the Access Linux Platform (ALP).

Well, maybe.

Sqlite
Gtk
GHost (Garnet host)
OpenSSL
SyncML

Developing for PalmOS

The legacy of the 68000: 32K codesegments
Application versus Shared Library
No stdio
"Databases"
Virtual File System (VFS)

source code in 4K memos

Two main developement tool chains:

Codewarrior by Metrowerks (no mac, no linux?)
PRC-Tools (linking multi-segments a pain-ish)

PODS

The Port, Part I.

What's Working

Lua core
Most of the libraries: table, string, math
Shell—sort of
"Stand-alone" applications

The Port, Part II.

What's Not

"dofile" from memo, arbitrary database, virutal file
io and os libraries
links to PalmOS

The Port, Part III.

What comes next.

read/execute Memos
Palm GUI
Stand-alone compiler

PalmOS and Lua