New toys to play with

Doug Coleman sent me his old Cingular 8525 (Windows CE) phone. And my friend Erik in Ottawa gave me his ancient Dell Windows laptop in exchange for a Mac Mini that I haven't used since I bought the G5. Win-win situation: I get a Windows box for development, Erik gets a (faster!) computer which doesn't suffer from spyware/adware/etc. :-)

I'm now going to be in charge of the Windows CE port of Factor, and I can help out a bit with the Windows XP/Vista port too! Doug can now focus on more interesting things. I've been pestering him about finishing the regexp library for a while now... :-)

I installed Cygwin, CeGCC and Microsoft's ActiveSync on the Windows laptop, then I got a command prompt going on the phone using the directions in Chris Double's weblog. Note that Chris doesn't mention this, but Windows CE does not ship with a registry editor; to edit the registry you need to install a third-party registry editor. I used TRE.

Doug originally got the phone cheap with an AT&T contract; I used the Hermes Unlocker tool to CID/SIM unlock the phone (which is illegal, voids the warranty, etc.)

While Factor 0.90 worked on Windows CE and ARM, there have been a few changes since then. First of all is the new two-tiered compilation; I have to implement the ARM backend for the new non-optimizing compiler. Then I have to make some (minor) changes to the ARM optimizing compiler backend.

Once it is in a working state, my first task will be removing the dependency on CMD.EXE. It is a pain to install (requires editing the registry) and is rather unusable on the small screen of the phone. Instead I'll borrow code from PythonCE, which implements a simple input/output console using the Win32 API. This will increase the size of Factor's VM on Windows CE somewhat, however it won't depend on the hard to install CMD.EXE.

Eventually I want to get the Factor UI running on the phone, with a cut-down UI listener and workspace. This way I can experiment with new input methods and interesting ways of writing code on the phone. I think Factor is concise and powerful enough that on-board development will be a practical possibility (of course you'll always be able to develop your Factor apps on a desktop machine and copy them over to your phone, but where's the fun in that?)

The phone only has 64 Mb of memory. While Factor's semispace GC is very efficient on systems with virtual memory and overcommit, on a phone with no swap having that semispace just hang around there sucking up RAM is really, really painful. I will be implementing an incremental mark and sweep GC at some point, which will improve interactive performance on desktop machines and reduce memory usage on the phone.