On 15 Aug., 22:50, Fabrizio Giudici <[email protected]> wrote: > Technically it could work - after all iPhone is going on with native > code, but the iPhone is a single processor business.
Half true: iOS runs on both x86 and ARM natively because the iPhone/ iPad simulator you run on the Mac doesn't emulate ARM, it executes native x86 code instead. When you deploy to a device, it just gets recompiled to ARM code (ARMv6 and ARMv7, to be more precise - see http://wanderingcoder.net/2010/07/19/ought-arm for details). This is possible because the underlying Mac OS X "parts" in iOS are based on BSD Linux and therefore are cross-platform by nature. > I don't think they would be happy to be forced to use all the > same processor, even in future (I must confess that I don't know how > many different processors are currently used by the Android phones). I think it's all ARM processors, but Intel is porting Android to x86 (http://www.geek.com/articles/mobile/intel-to-release-android-x86-for- netbooks-this-summer-20100625/). Realistically speaking, with ARM and x86 both iOS and Android are safe for the next ten years - there isn't a new CPU architecture in sight that can take the mobile world by storm. Even Microsoft got an ARM license recently (http:// www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4204863/Microsoft-takes-ARM-license). > Personally, I would drop any interest in mobile development if I was be > forced to > step back to native code. Objective-C on the Mac and iOS device is native code, but its runtime has garbage collection on the Mac and message sending (sending a message to a NIL object is simply ignored, so no more NullPointeExceptions, plus like in Groovy you can decide who should handle calls to methods that don't exist) instead of method invocation (Java) on Mac and iOS. You could argue these are traits of a virtual machine. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
