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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

It would be a travesty if RoboVM, a formerly open source project, did not re-open source their code before shutting down. I can't imagine there is any value to their code sitting in some closed Microsoft repository until the end of time.

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Absolutely. I'd love to see the "new Microsoft" step up and say "Under our stewardship, one of our acquisitions has abandoned a vital and heavily relied upon product. We're going to give it back to the community to ensure that it'll live on past Xamarin's ownership".

I doubt this is just RoboVM unilaterally making this decision. They're offering a full refund to all license holders - some decision maker somewhere is paying for this (be in Xamarin or Microsoft).

> I doubt this is just RoboVM unilaterally making this decision.

While they likely didn't make the decision to close up shop, RoboVM did unilaterally make the decision to close source the code 7 months ago. Additionally, they did make the decision to sell to Xamarin. They indicated that very few people contributed to the open source project, and with it being open source it was difficult, if not impossible, for them to make money as a business.

I understand that people want to make Microsoft the bad guy, but in this case RoboVM sealed this fate themselves a while back, and from their point of view they didn't really have a choice if they wanted to make any money.

As another comment pointed out, the old open source repository is still available on github as of now.

And libgdx single handily gave them a market. RoboVM would have withered long ago without it.

Yes, the fact being that there are a few commercial native AOT compilers for Java and all FOSS alternatives for AOT compilation fail to get any community support.

I think this is because the gulf between the user and one with the ability to do the hacking is so far apart. Those with a pressing need to get Java compiled into a native exe also has ability to pay for an off the shelf solution.

I'm calling them "Microsoft Nouveaux"

Ask and you shall receive. https://github.com/robovm/robovm

See the tags, that's version 1.8. See the official blog, the latest is 1.14.

I always find it funny how Github chose the poop color for Java.

Or you know... coffee: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_coffee

Damn, TIL that bar was not decorative.

Easily the least discoverable part of Github's UI.

I agree, a little healthy competition is a good thing. Xamarin being the only player (afaik) in town is an odd thing, maybe a result of Xamarin open sourcing a decision they couldn't afford to compete against possibly?

Edit: Forgot Xamarin technically owns RoboVM, maybe Microsoft wants to avoid any legal issues with Oracle.

Xamarin is not the only game in town, if one is doing game apps.

Assuming one is ok with a little dosis of JNI pain on Android, given that C++ is a first class language in iOS (via Objective-C++) and Windows (C++/CX and or via WRL).

That's JNI pain + C++ pain (this is coming from a guy who just did a C++ project full time for >year - C# and C++ aren't in the same league when it comes to productivity) - and C++ has no access to android java api - xamarin is just a whole different kind of solution to this - you can literally have all code in one language across all platforms - C++ can't do this without a custom UI like QT

What you are forgetting is that some guys at Xamarin already went through that pain for their customers.

And if there is the need to use something that they have yet to wrap, there isn't any difference between C# and C++.

Also in Android there is the additional pain of synchronising the .NET and JAVA GCs.

C++ is a good language, except for the warts introduced due to C copy-paste compatibility.

C++ is a straight-up awesome language, on that you and I fully agree. And I have been there with regards to the teeth-pulling pain of Xamarin projects when you want to do something nontrivial. So it kind of pains me to disagree with you, but I do. C++ is awesome. I love it. But I also recognize that I barely trust myself to write it, after ten years or so of exposure and a few years of steady writing it. I don't trust off-the-rack mobile developers to write it safely and correctly. To that end, something like Xamarin or the RIP'd RoboVM provide a significant benefit: by offering the kind of guardrails that C++ can't, they do significantly improve the ability of people who don't eat and breathe this stuff to get something out the door. (Whether or not that's a desirable trait...reasonable people can differ. But it is in demand.)

Sure, Xamarin has done a lot of that work--but that's also kind of the point in the first place.

Don't get me wrong, I would like that more type safe languages were available for native cross platform development and I am getting myself deeper in Xamarin.

However one thing that my likeness for Turbo Pascal and Oberon teached me was that making applications with languages which aren't first class on the platform SDKs opens the door to situations like these.

So I rather be more pragmatic, even if it goes a bit against to my preferences and keep my code free of company politics, which may lead to porting the application to other languages.

Checkout the remsoftware stuff, they provide cross platform c#, java, and swift.

And Object Pascal.

However by doing that, Microsoft protects Xamarin from competition.

Given this would compete in theory with other Microsoft products, I'd be surprised if the work is released as open source.

It makes sense from a regulatory risk mitigation point of view, however.

If that was the case, in my opinion, HTML based native support would be required on mobile devices; fact that it is not is beyond me.

We rather use sane UI development environments when coding native applications.

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