[sword-devel] KaiOS, Firefox OS

[Nathan Phillip Brink]

On Sat, Mar 27, 2021 at 07:15:56AM +0100, Tobias Klein wrote:
> Also, the KaiOS developer portal does not mention how to deal with 
> native code.
> https://developer.kaiostech.com/
> 
> So ... while the HTML/CSS/JavaScript part could probably be ported 
> easily, some form of native integration / bridge would be needed to make 
> SWORD work.

The point of kaiOS is that native code in user-installed apps isn’t
just discouraged, it simply isn’t supported by the architecture at
all. The idea is that modern JavaScript runtimes with good JITs are
fast enough for even complex applications and, for more demanding
things, WebAssembly enables you to run semi-precompiled code while
reducing pressure on the garbage collector system, solving the
remaining technical performance problems with JIT-based platforms.

You’ll need to use something like emscripten (probably the best/least
duplicative effort option) or a JavaScript port of SWORD to load
modules. You will need to be able to remap the parts that try to
access the filesystem for you to using web storage APIs or
kaiOS-specific filesystem access APIs (which should be possible as
long as libsword has an asynchronous virtual file system layer).

When I played with a FirefoxOS phone a long time ago, I used something
that looks like https://zefanja.github.io/biblez-ng/ . It claims to
use https://github.com/zefanja/swordjs , “a pure Javascript library
to read bible modules”. So it looks like this is the not-emscripten
option. As long as the module format does not have too many new
features since then, I assume swordjs could be updated. But if you
want to use something like Bishop which, I assume, relies on other
features of libsword (beyond simply loading text out of a module just
enough to display it), that would be nontrivial (and duplicative of
effort). So maybe the emscripten option should be investigated.

But to get something minimal and working out there, the BibleZ project
could probably almost be published as is…

-- 
binki

Don’t forget to check for missing or extraneous apostrophes!
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