Am 17.05.2014 20:12, schrieb Nick Sabalausky:
On 5/16/2014 3:53 PM, Joakim wrote:
On Friday, 16 May 2014 at 14:15:20 UTC, Chris wrote:
Mind you, how many of the big "be all end all"-technologies that have
been hyped over the years are really good (including community base
projects)? JS, Java, Ajax, PHP, Ruby, iOS, Android ...? With good I
mean really good, not omnipresent.
Agree with you on all of those, except for iOS. I know many of us hate
how much its success is driven by marketing, but it appears to be a very
solid product technically. At least that's what I read, I haven't
bought an Apple product in a decade because of their crazy stance on
patents and how closed they've become.
However, just looking at iOS technically, even the latest iPad Air and
iPhone 5s run on just 1 GB of RAM and still regularly outperform Android
devices, which is crazy considering Android superphones/tablets have up
to 3 GBs of RAM these days. iOS devices repeatedly benchmark as the
least laggy for touch. Nick may not believe in people voting with their
wallets, but iOS devices have garnered Apple a couple hundred billion in
profits so far:
http://www.phonearena.com/news/Samsung-and-Apple-reportedly-earned-87.9-of-the-smartphone-market-profits-for-the-last-6-years_id54030
I suppose you can hate on Obj-C, but that's not really iOS. The latest
release got bogged down in all the bling, but that's more like Apple
heaped too much icing on top: the cake is still great.
Why isn't iOS good?
The problem with iOS devices isn't software bloat, it's overall design
and, as you mentioned, Apple's...uhh...orwellian-ness. (IMO, anyway) I
could go on and on and on about iPhone's design problems (and have done
so ;) )
And I'm not surprised Android is a little slower/laggier than iOS, what
with Dalvik. I don't care how much they've optimized it, a JVM-alike at
the system-level on a mobile device is just asking for "second-place at
best" (performance-wise anyway). They're now forced to go out of their
way with stuff like ART just to mitigate some of the problems Dalvik
introduced. That's the one big thing I *do* think Apple really got right
- native system-level with ARC, instead of mobile JVM clone.
They haven't. That is the whole point.
It is well known among Java developers with Android experience, that
Dalvik is a kind of good enough implementation, without much effort.
Almost as a modern BASIC.
It only had improvements on 2.2 (got a JIT), 2.3 (small improvements and
a little bette GC) and 4.3 (a few more intrisics).
The original Dalvik architect is no longer in the team.
I am waiting eagerly for the Google IO ART session to see how the new
AOT compiler behaves. Specially when compared with MIDL .NET compilers.
(FWIW/BTW, MS has actually hit a rather interesting middle-ground with
WinRT's sort-of-a-VM-but-not-exactly approach. Not that I'm a fan of
Win8/WinRT/Metro/MS/etc, but that particular aspect is quite noteworthy
IMO.)
They basically implemented the original model of .NET. Based on the
available documentation, COM+ VOS as it was called is quite similar to
WinRT. Then Java happenend, and another design approach was done.
From the MSDN blogs, it seems the native side has been getting strong
since the Longhorn failure, which lead to WinRT, RyuJIT, .NET Native and
stronger focus on C++. This is my opinion, not sure how well it
matches reality.
--
Paulo
