From: Jim Witte (jswitte_at_bloomington.in.us)
Date: Fri Sep 10 2004 - 22:42:06 PDT
>> Basically a subset of the question might be:
>> - should we work on JIT emulation and run on any PDA with any
>> processor?
>> or
>> - should we work on porting Einstein for natice code execution on
>> ARM-based PDAs?
>> or
>> - should we work on porting Einstein for native code execution on top
>> of an open source POSIX-compliant operating system (like NetBSD or
>> Linux)?
I'd vote for the ARM-based PDA solution or a POSIX solution.
ARM-based because it seems like it would be faster and simpler to do
than making a JIT. (The iPod is ARM based too, and that would *look*
cool, even though it would be totally useless) With an ARM-based
soltion, if you used a device that had a real floating-point
coprocessor, and could remove/disable the FPE code, it could make
certain things faster (maybe Rosetta for one, because I'm sure the
neural-net code is floating point) How many ARM-based PDAs are there
out there now, for which documentation is available enough for stuff
like display access, etc (who am I to talk about docs when Paul and
Nicolas just reverse engineered large portions of the NewtOS?)
The POSIX solution gives the option of easy porting to Linux, MacOSX,
FreeBSD, etc. Would this still be emulating every single instruction
unless the POSIX environment happened to be running on ARM-hardware, or
would it include a JIT? Porting to a "desktop OS" makes possible
explorations of what NewtonOS would really be like on a desktop, and
the *possibility* of bring more developers (as Simon Bell said in his
paper, "my goal is to have Mail V running on the desktop"). The
downside is that it would most likely be slower (more layers), and
there are things you want in a desktop OS that the NewtonOS might not
be able to do without a lot of hacking, like real multithreading of
interpreters (a native Java interpreter for instance), and
multithreading of the graphics environment - an arbitration layer would
have to be built for QD to work with NS and Java for instance. Of
course, in a POSIX port, the QD might just go away - the calls would
still be there, but would be pulled up immediately some X-Windows or
other graphics layer. And POSIX OS's can run on many things, including
PDAs.
Jim
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