Goo on a cellphone..almost

[Chris Double <chris@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Just for fun I tried to get Goo running on a Nokia 9210
cellphone. This cellphone has a keyboard and a 640x200 display and can
run C++ applications. It uses the Symbian OS [1]. Unfortunately it
only has about 3.5MB of usable memory as the remaining of its total
8MB is used by the OS and core applications.

The SDK for the phone uses gcc for the ARM. To keep the executable
size down I changed main.goo so it didn't 'use' anything unneeded on
the phone like tasks, g2c, etc. The executable built to just on 2MB,
leaving 1.5MB for heap.

Unfortunately Boehm doesn't support Symbian so I disabled the GC and
replaced with 'malloc' planning to work on that latter.

Every thing compiled (with tweaks) and the executable ran fine in the
phone emulator supplied with the SDK. On the hardware itself it ran
out of memory due to nothing being GC'd. To bring Goo to an
interactive prompt without GC it needs about 2MB of ram. Close.

If I ever get some time to play with it I'll see if I can get Boehm to
work on Symbian. Any thoughts on what else could be stripped out in
terms of standard libraries for a 'Embedded Goo'?

The news isn't all bad though. Other Symbian phones, like the
Sony/Ericcsson P800 have much more memory so it'd probably run with
ease on that when it comes out. 

[1] http://www.symbian.com

Chris.
-- 
http://www.double.co.nz/cl