Path: csiph.com!x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net!newsfeed.hal-mli.net!feeder1.hal-mli.net!weretis.net!feeder4.news.weretis.net!feeder.news-service.com!94.75.214.39.MISMATCH!aioe.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: "Nasser M. Abbasi" Newsgroups: comp.lang.java.programmer Subject: Re: Android?Why Dalvik? Date: Mon, 30 May 2011 16:32:15 -0700 Organization: Aioe.org NNTP Server Lines: 29 Message-ID: References: Reply-To: nma@12000.org NNTP-Posting-Host: TUXTYYqX1yG7hs3zxUg7ng.user.speranza.aioe.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Complaints-To: abuse@aioe.org User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.17) Gecko/20110414 Thunderbird/3.1.10 X-Notice: Filtered by postfilter v. 0.8.2 Xref: x330-a1.tempe.blueboxinc.net comp.lang.java.programmer:4771 On 5/30/2011 3:55 PM, BGB wrote: > > my idea was less drastic: > rather than by creating an entirely new set of abstractions, one creates > a VM which is itself better suited to heterogeneous environments. > > in C, we called this mechanism "#ifdef". > a new language can likewise devise newer, ifdef-like mechanisms. > I know all about #ifdef. One a project long time ago, I worked on porting Netscape web server source code, it would build for I think 18 different platforms. Most of these are flavors of Unix, few flavors of windows, and OS2 and such. The same source code, 18 or so different build targets. Just understanding the makefiles, never mind the 2 million lines or so source code with the #ifdefs in them, was a nightmare :) The same was for the Netscape browser code. Java is supposed to solve all this #ifdef stuff. --Nasser