Curious about WM5 execution, .net, emulation etc

[Fuchsteufel]

I'm a game programmer by profession, quite knowledgeable about hardware and OSes in general, and somewhat familiar with the .net programming environment. But I can't seem to find the answer to this simple, but very important (given the abominably slow speed of WM5), question:

Do programs running on Windows Mobile devices (WM5 in particular) execute natively on the processor, or do they go through any kind of emulation or JIT compilation?

Related questions: Do all programs on WM run in the .net environment? Or can WM5 execute "native" programs as well?

Are WM .net programs installed as MSIL (non-native) assemblies? When they are executed, do they go through the .net JIT compilation process, thus causing periodic delays, and doubling the amount of precious RAM needed?

And if any "native" programs run on WM5... how "native" are they? Isn't it true that starting with WM 2003 all programs were compiled to run on the ARM processor? And that if your device had a non-ARM processor (say, oh, a TI OMAP), it had to emulate the ARM code, thus running the program at a fraction of native speed?

I can't seem to get an answer to these questions, and it's driving me buggy. I want to know whether one of the reasons WM devices are slower than an 8-bit computer is because of an evil & unnecessary (IMO) processor emulation architecture, or whether it's just due to Microsoft's terrible terrible programming in general.

Cheers :)

[mamaich]

Most of WinMobile applications are "native". I.e. they are executed directly on CPU without any emulation layer. On my device there are no MSIL programs at all.
I don't know how .NET apps are executed, but probaly the process is identical to a "big PC" - something like JIT compilation.

WM5 is slower because it is more secure then older OSes, it has lots os security checks that slowdown things incredibly. It also allows mixing ARM (32-bit) and THUMB (16-bit) code in a program, and 16-bit code is typically slower. And it uses "persistent storage" - this is the main reason if incredible slowdown comparing to WM2003SE.

Regardong TI OMAP. As far as I remember it uses the same ARM/THUMB instruction sets as intel PXA CPUs. It probably does not have intel x-scale instructions, which are rarely used (mostly in games).

I want to know whether one of the reasons WM devices are slower than an 8-bit computer is because of an evil & unnecessary (IMO) processor emulation architecture, or whether it's just due to Microsoft's terrible terrible programming in general.The slowdown is due to the ugly architecture of Windows Mobile OS. This is similar to all OSes made by that company - the newer the OS is, the slower it works.