Tell them, my song.

Quite frequently, a discussion pops up in the BlitzMax community about a cell phone port of the BlitzMax compiler. As of today, BlitzMax supports four major platforms: Win32, OS X/PowerPC, OS X/x86 and Linux/x86. Most so-called smartphones use the ARM processor architecture, so when we are talking about BlitzMax for mobile phones, we are firstly talking about a BlitzMax compiler for that specific CPU. But secondly, we also need to talk about a target cell phone operating system.

That smartphone market is currently dominated by RIM (Blackberry), Windows Mobile and Symbian OS. Apple also managed to gain a significant share and, probably more importantly, they have generated a lot of hype around their mobile phone during the last year.

Google announced their own cell phone initiative which they named ‘Android’, and it actually is a development framework based upon Java and other Open Source technologies. There still is no Android phone on the market, and it currently looks a bit as if Android is going to remain what we call a ‘paper tiger’ in Germany.

There are also several cell phones that use operating systems based upon the Linux kernel, and naturally, most Linux geeks vote loudly for GNU/Linux as the target platform of choice for BlitzMax for mobile phones. Companies like ABIresearch estimate a number of around 203 million mobile phones that will be using Linux based operating systems in the year 2012. That looks quite impressive, but it does not say whether this will be a unified Linux platform and if all those cell phones will be software compatible to each other.

Unless a unified platform like Android succeeds, except for the kernel there will probably be only little similarity between those Linux-based cell phones. This situation with various incompatible distributions is already a show-stopper for commercial desktop apps for GNU/Linux and one of the many reasons why large software manufacturers like Adobe are not porting their software to GNU/Linux - they don’t know which Linux distribution they should target. I cannot imagine that the situation is or will be any better in the cell phone world.

Currently, not even the various Java ME implementations for mobile phones are compatible to each other. John Carmack, the founder of and mastermind behind id Software, wrote quite nicely about his experience with Java ME: “Write once, run anywhere. Ha. Hahaha.” I think that pretty much says it.

May the future of Linux on cell phones be bright, but today is 2008, and this is about BlitzMax for mobile phones in a near time frame.

This leaves us with a realistic choice between Windows Mobile and OS X iPhone.

Except for the name, how much has Windows Mobile actually in common with Windows XP/Vista? Supposedly not enough to make porting a compiler for Win32 to Windows Mobile an easy task.

OS X iPhone, however, shares not only the very same operating system kernel with OS X Leopard, but also many of its core frameworks. It should be relatively easy to port BlitzMax to this third OS X platform.

Unlike Java or Flash, BlitzMax would not run into the ‘interpreter’ license clause, since it is a pure compiler and does not use interpreter technologies. (Apple for mysterious reasons prohibits the use of interpreter technologies in their SDK EULA.)

Of all brands and manufacturers, only Apple has a standardized distribution channel for third party software that reaches all of their already more than 10 million phone customers through one portal, including billing services. They also have the most sophisticated and available development platform with the richest feature set.

Except for the official Apple SDK, BlitzMax would not even have a competition in that market.

If I were Blitz Research Ltd and had to select a mobile platform, I would bet on OS X iPhone.

PS: ecto has once again swallowed the original posting while publishing, so I had to re-write the entire posting. This hasn’t happend for the first time, and I just ‘love’ it when ecto does this to me.

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