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Public Beta Availiable - Win/Firmware
04-16-2021, 11:35 PM (This post was last modified: 04-16-2021 11:36 PM by Jean-Baptiste Boric.)
Post: #30
RE: Public Beta Availiable - Win/Firmware
(04-16-2021 06:49 PM)parisse Wrote:  I really believe that the assumption that if third parties have access to native programmation, they will necessarily begin by trying to break the exam mode is simply *wrong*. Hackspire has since several years published information about the LEDs of the Nspire CX, but AFAIK KhiCAS is the first ndless program that implements it's own exam mode and it does not break the exam mode rules.
Independent developers on a calculator do obviously not want to see the target calculator banned on tests. It is their best interest not to touch to exam mode unless it's really necessary (which was the case for KhiCAS on the Nspire CX).
My personal opinion is that it would be a win, not a loss, for HP if the Prime would provide a way to run native code.

Well, it's not me who needs to be convinced.

To be fair, native code support does require design/development/QA time and manpower to implement, which until recently seemed to be in rather short supply for the HP Prime. It does carries non-zero amounts of risk that can be mitigated against at an extra cost. I doubt HP would be willing to go down that road. Instead, maybe we would ask for something more realistic.

Personally, I'd vote for WebAssembly support. It's an open industry standard, it's sandboxed by design, several open-source implementations are available under different licenses (Wasm3 is under the MIT license for example) and the LLVM toolchain supports it as a backend. People who keep complaining about KhiCAS on the HP Prime would finally be able to run it (even though it's mostly just giac which is already available by pressing the CAS key, along with some extra bits and a bespoke UI).

It's not quite as fast as native code execution especially if it's just interpreted, but most program and libraries can be ported to it as-is and the HP Prime has ample performance headroom to handle that. We don't even technically need HP's support since a WebAssembly interpreter could be written in HP PPL, although performance would be rather poor when compared to an official solution.
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RE: Public Beta Availiable - Win/Firmware - Jean-Baptiste Boric - 04-16-2021 11:35 PM



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