[Mono-dev] Mono for Symbian

[Neil Cowburn]

Hey, Andreas

> If by this you mean adapting the Mono build system and sources to  
> compile for the target platform then this is the only priority I see  
> at the moment.

Accept my apologies. I incorrectly described the PAL acronym. PAL
actually expands to Platform Adaptation (not Adaption, which isn't even
a word) Layer. This is layer of code that provides a common set of
interfaces for accessing the underlying OS APIs. When porting the CLR
over to a new operating system, each porting team must implement the PAL
interfaces for their particular OS. The CLR and GC make calls to the PAL
interfaces rather than the underlying OS APIs. This significantly
reduces the porting workload as once the PAL has been implemented, the
CLR should, in theory, pretty much work as is (assuming the JIT compiler
and GC are compatible). 

Once that work has been done, you should be able to take and use the
class libraries as-is. 

> To create S60 and UIQ UIs we'll need new class libraries  
> anyway.

Yeah, this is another big problem with the CLI. As it stands, there is
no defined profile in ECMA-335 (the CLI spec) that details the
requirements for implementing a graphical library, so CLI implementors
are free to set their own standards. It would be nice to see something
like the PAL for SWF, so that the underlying UI technology is abstracted
away from the application developer and they wouldn't have to care about
whether they are using GWES or X11 or Aqua. 

> ...and your SDF has done a good job there. Unfortunately Microsoft
counterpoints that effort by 
> dropping support for e.g. Pocket PC 2002 in .NET Compact Framework
2.0, breaking 
> cross-platform compatibility for any code that uses generics.

Thanks for the compliment :) To be fair, I can understand Microsoft's
decision to drop PPC 2002 support. There have been 4 drops of Windows
Mobile since PPC 2002 and the hardware landscape has exploded somewhat
since then too, so their test matrix is huge. Dropping PPC 2002 knocks a
few thousand test configurations off the matrix.