The Evaluation of Squeak VM on ICRUISE PDA

Nowadays several commercialized PDAs are going to have enough performance to accomodate dynamic programming language environments. With such systems, one can not only run a program but also write/modify the program to make the program fit to his own requirement. Implementing such system is a step for the realization of the “Personal Dynamic Media” that has been envisioned since more than 20 years ago[2]. The author thinks one of such PDAs is “ICRUISE (pronounced as ‘eye-cruise’)”. which released from SHARP in April 1999. As written in the next section, the ICRUISE is equipped with a hundreds Mhz CPU, megabytes of DRAM, and a VGA resolution color LCD. As far as the author knows, it is one of the “best” PDAs with respect to the performance. One promissing candidates for such programming environment is Squeak[1]. Squeak is a modern implementation of Smalltalk and well designed for the portability, which ranges from the workstations to the PDAs. Porting Squeak on ICRUISE is a good experience to verify its portability and to see what can be done on the state of the art hardware and software. In fact, thanks to the portability, the author was able to run Squeak within two weeks since the start of the porting effort. This paper describes the experience of the porting effort and the performance evaluation of the Squeak/ICRUISE. The following sections are organized as follows: Section 2 describes the feature of ICRUISE PDA. Section 3 describes the issues on porting the Squeak VM. Section 4 describes the code written for the port. Section 5 describes the preliminary performance evaluation of Squeak VM on ICRUISE. Section 6 concludes the paper.