Path: csiph.com!x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net!newsfeed.hal-mli.net!feeder1.hal-mli.net!border3.nntp.dca.giganews.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!npeer02.iad.highwinds-media.com!news.highwinds-media.com!feed-me.highwinds-media.com!post01.iad.highwinds-media.com!newsfe22.iad.POSTED!00000000!not-for-mail From: David Lamb User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.17) Gecko/20110414 Thunderbird/3.1.10 MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.java.programmer Subject: Re: Android?Why Dalvik? References: In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Lines: 15 Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: 67.193.237.254 X-Complaints-To: abuse@cogeco.net X-Trace: newsfe22.iad 1307155116 67.193.237.254 (Sat, 04 Jun 2011 02:38:36 UTC) NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 04 Jun 2011 02:38:36 UTC Date: Fri, 03 Jun 2011 22:38:33 -0400 Xref: x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net comp.lang.java.programmer:4968 On 30/05/2011 6:55 PM, BGB wrote: > well, IMO, trying to homogenize the environment is itself a problem... > > this is actually part of what I think is a weak-point of the JVM strategy: > they try to gloss over the real OS/... by basically creating a new layer > of abstractions, and wrapping everything in the new API. Writing portable code usually means giving up on some specific features of individual OS's ("homogenize" seems to me an uncecessarily pejorative word for it). I'v written #ifdef code like you've suggested and got tired of it; even with just keeping them inside header files, eventually the whole thing became unwieldy. I'm sure that *some* programs need to be OS-specific, but fewer than some programmers think (not a dig at you personally; just remembering some other conversations I've heard on similar subjects).