RE: [PHP-DEV] PHP on WinCE

> -----Original Message----- > From: Wez Furlong [mailto:wez@thebrainroom.com] > Sent: Wednesday, June 19, 2002 11:21 AM > To: Peter Petermann > Cc: Wez Furlong; php-dev@lists.php.net > Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] PHP on WinCE > > I've a feeling that porting to CE will be pretty much a case of adding > a new build target to the existing PHP-Win32 source and compiling, with > the odd #ifdef here and there. That sounds really nice in comparision > to the idea of writing from scratch in C. Bzz. Wrong. Remember Wince is 16 bit character oriented. Win32 is 8 bit character oriented. Every System call that is made would need to be changed. It's not a big deal if CString is your basic string unit, but otherwise every API call requires a call to MultiByteToWideChar for each char * passed to it (although there shouldn't be many of those in the source). Add to it the incomplete stdlib implementation (which will probably be a problem) and you've got yourself one big pain in the neck. I ported metakit (www.equi4.com/metakit) which isn't as involved as PHP, but it still took me a long time. I'm not saying it can't be done, just that I wouldn't attempt it. First of all, any interpreted language is going to require a memory hit to load the interpreter before even beginning to run the program. Secondly, since your PDA only runs at 206 MHz or less, and you only have 8-64 MB of memory anyway, much of it used up by the other crap on the device, I would never write anything but C/C++ for CE. C++ is slow enough as it is. Microsoft hasn't even got VB right. It's your time and energy though. Of course I think it would be pretty cool to have PHP on Windows CE. I know Sascha or someone was talking about an embedded PHP version a couple of months ago. > Porting to other PDA OS's might be a bit more work, in terms of the > build system, but that's not on the cards just yet. Palm is much nicer to program for, except for the gui. You only have a 33MHz processor to work with though (well, until now that is). Joseph