On 1/4/17, Antonio Scuri <antonio.sc...@gmail.com> wrote: > OK. I just saw the second video. Sorry about your friend.
Thank you. > As a C/C++ programmer I'm very disappointed with Android. Maybe from a > Java perspective it is a better world. For the NDK, every time I go around speaking about the Android NDK, I always get developers who have also worked with the NDK nodding their heads and coming up to me at the end, thanking me for calling Google out on how bad the NDK is. For the SDK, while I know there are some people out there who like Android development, these people usually aren't the ones doing serious cross-platform work. Additionally, for classical Java developers, Android isn't so great because the APIs are completely different. From a performance perspective, Dalvik was a disaster. And despite Google's claims about the improvements in ARTS, I'm still not impressed. They made a big deal 2 releases ago about how they are going to AoT compilation and how it was going to solve everything. Now this last cycle they are talking about how they are going back to JIT and going to solve everything (and silently ignoring the fact that they just a year before said the exact opposite). (And classical Java/Hotspot developers don't understand that the performance characteristics on Android are completely different from Hotspot. Many also haven't noticed any of the research papers or the general acknowledgement in people who build garbage collectors that you need 4x-6x times the peak RAM you are using to keep GC performance from killing you. The best Android devices tend to have 2X the RAM compared to iOS devices, but this is clearly not nearly enough just by the theory. Android itself is much more piggy than iOS so there is that much more ground to make up for. The whole Galaxy Note 7 exploding battery fiasco is partly a result of this. Android phones need much denser batteries because the platform software is so inefficient compared to iOS. Samsung pushed the envelope too far this time. Meanwhile, Apple can ship very boring/conservative batteries and make a bigger profit because they get the same performance with less hardware.) Then there is also the completely broken/messed up build system. First there was Ant vs. Eclipse. Then the big Gradle/Android Studio migration. All these systems are terrible in their own ways. And their NDK build systems have been a cruel joke. I think a lot of the Android APIs and design are awful. I know not everybody agrees, but it is clear that there is massive confusion in many aspects of Android, like with life-cycles, and especially the whole Activities vs. Views vs. Fragments thing. They had to do a whole Google I/O session on Fragments talking about improvements they made trying to clear up the confusion they created. And 8 years later, Android audio is still fundamentally broken and unusable for entire classes of apps. I am also seeing a ton of advocacy for a new language called Kotlin (built on the Java VM). Considering it isn't officially sanctioned and the Android team doesn't seem to want to have anything to do with it, I'm surprised at how much traction it has gotten. I've never seen so much advocacy for a 3rd party language on a particular platform before. I take this as another sign as discontent with the Android Java status quo. > About your comments, I loved this paragraph: > > "So I agree that the lack of native Mac Cocoa support for IUP has > hindered its adoption. I know that is the reason I didn’t use it at > first. Instead, I’ve used many other frameworks over the years like > wxWidgets, Qt, only to come out frustrated and burned by all of them. > Now that I’ve finally used IUP, I see how well thought out its design > is and how brilliant it is in so many respects. But the Mac limitation > is still a major obstacle for me because I work in developer tools, > and most developers I meet nowadays have Macs, because Mac is the only > platform that lets you develop for iOS and also can do Android. Hence, > this is why I started implementing the Cocoa backend." > > I don't have much to add, just cheering for the best. > > Thanks, > Scuri Thanks. So any news on you being able to get a Mac to help out? Or maybe using GNUStep? (My code won't work with GNUStep right now, but I think we could do some things to fix that.) Thanks, Eric ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, SlashDot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Iup-users mailing list Iup-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/iup-users
