Path: csiph.com!x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net!newsfeed.hal-mli.net!feeder1.hal-mli.net!weretis.net!feeder1.news.weretis.net!news.albasani.net!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: BGB Newsgroups: comp.lang.java.programmer Subject: Re: Android?Why Dalvik? Date: Mon, 30 May 2011 03:26:47 -0700 Organization: albasani.net Lines: 60 Message-ID: References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: news.albasani.net cQCNDHn7u54r+5BGohPbJsqYyMocZq2d47MajJv5QtvpIj9A5/3yYwES8Fy8Syt67oniNul91TP0uU5rjcOzD81g+49SI/ZHbKjezrnwn1PkTnbvpoZtxyY0zunxcRIs NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 30 May 2011 10:29:49 +0000 (UTC) Injection-Info: news.albasani.net; logging-data="5/uFREdvTitK8R4khE9nUN+ROGkPfjH7pxnzKvxpEInWQ0KuC5z4kgNctTXqHn9V/Di8vlJbx5ZP3dcarNp9oZx/QYRqMW/ZpjRK2DizJQ8C90Nfivp/6KhlBsjvyeGF"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@albasani.net" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.17) Gecko/20110414 Thunderbird/3.1.10 In-Reply-To: Cancel-Lock: sha1:MNULST1E69nYwP3V4R8TPEhZ/u4= Xref: x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net comp.lang.java.programmer:4734 On 5/30/2011 12:54 AM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote: > In message, Steve Sobol wrote: > >> You write Android apps in Java (with the exception of some low-level >> code which is written in C; I understand that's mostly done for games). > > I see a lot of portable software also done in C. For example, the Python and > other interpreters used in the Scripting Layer for Android > are largely unchanged C code > from their versions on other platforms. > yeah... C source code generally doesn't need to change that much between one target and another (after all, most variations in OS and architecture can be trivially handled via #ifdef magic). the main issue is mostly that of needing to be rebuilt for each OS and CPU, since binary code is generally not portable between targets... this is not a huge issue, but it is still annoying. granted, it is interesting that this is more generally seen as an OS issue than a language or technology issue... "well, this is a Windows' app, of course it doesn't work on Mac or Linux...", despite that all 3 versions will likely build from the same source. granted, many projects are distributed in source-form, but this has its own set of drawbacks (not everything is ideally distributed as source code). would be nice if compiling C to ByteCode and using a JIT at the target site were a little more commonplace... granted, yes, compiling C to a portable bytecode and remaining strictly conforming with the ISO C standards itself poses a few problems, but these can be fudged (C can work here, just some things need to be "reinterpreted" slightly...). (as-imagined, the compiler would likely look a bit strange if compared against a more traditional compiler, but I don't feel like going into this at the moment...). I don't expect C will go away either though, as it itself has a few of its own sets of merits. MS sort of did something half-assed with C++/CLI, but C++/CLI manages to produce IL that is itself not terribly portable... I also am left with a "sour taste" regarding .NET in general... although, in many ways I like C# and .NET more in a purely technical sense, most things going on with it are in general much less appealing (.NET is unencumbered in roughly the same way that a Chia Pet is free to roam about a tabletop...). so, what will the future hold?...