Vesselin, >It's just not designed at all with systems programming in mind.
That is my impression as well. When I first started working on this platform, I quickly realized that terms like "database" or even "operating system" carried a different conotation than one might expect. In my view, Palm OS was evidently designed simply as a collection of useful service routines for performing UI and manipulating "database" records. It wasn't an "operating system" from the standpoint of really playing traffic cop for what occured on the system. It just provided common services. I think that is very undertandable given the memory footprint of the original device which ran in what, 128K of memory? And that is for *both* the dynamic heap and storage heap! (I don't know how much ROM it had for the OS and PIM apps -- I seem to remember hearing 512K?) Easy to see what it would be a very lightweight "operating system" at version 1. My first device was OS 3.1, so I'm not too familar with what was added in 2.x and 3.0 releases. I think it had likely come a long way already by that point compared to the original design. But I've always suspected many of the types of issues you are battling now can be traced to my suposition that it wasn't really designed as a true "operating system" at all. I think in OS 1.x to 4.x devices, the real "operating system" may be the underlying kernel licensed from Kadak but that we have no official way to interact with it directly. And while OS 5.x is a complete rewrite and doesn't utilize the Kadak core anymore, I think it was designed as a stepping stone transition phase while retaining as much compatibility as possible with m68k applications. And I don't know what has happened to Cobalt. :( Doug -- For information on using the Palm Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see http://www.palmos.com/dev/support/forums/
