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Comment by fermigier | Hacker News Reader

1. "Realm is not an ORM, and is not built on top of SQLite. Instead we’ve built a full database for mobile app developers, one that uses native objects that are dynamically mapped to a full, custom database engine (not just a key-value store)."

=> Why not use the terms "object database" or "OODBMS", then ?

2. "Realm supports Java, Objective-C, React Native, Swift and Xamarin."

=> "React Native" is not a language, why not just state that you support "JavaScript" ?

3. What about Python ?

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1. We are close to an object database, but with some subtle distinctions from the mainline expectations I believe — data is serialized in a language-independent binary format, that is actually column-oriented. We also have full indexing available of all fields. It’s not that object databases can’t do that, it’s just that most people probably don’t expect that level of access. And to be honest, there are marketing considerations too, in the OODBMS feels very dated as a term.

2. We don’t support JavaScript in general at the moment, only JavaScript that runs inside JavaScriptCore inside React Native. Otherwise, we lack the C++ APIs that we rely on to power the underlying storage engine. We are trying to add support for more JavaScript runtimes though.

3. Python support is doable, but we are focusing 100% on mobile front-ends right now. We don’t even support using Realm from Java outside of Android, for example. Eventually we do want to add support for Python, Ruby, node.js, etc.

Looking forward to Cordova/Ionic support, our community would love this (I see it's slated already, cool).

React Native isn't a language, but it is an application platform. JavaScript just happens to be the language for that platform. The Realm bindings for JS are specific to that platform and they won't work with traditional hybrid apps.

> 3. What about Python ?

Is there any practical way to use Python for mobile apps? Realm is only targeting mobile platforms AFAIK.

Some people are active in this domain, see: https://www.python.org/community/sigs/current/mobile-sig/ and https://mail.python.org/pipermail/mobile-sig/

Two approaches that seem to work (or to be promising) are Kivy (https://kivy.org/) for cross-platform and PyBee / VOC (http://pybee.org/voc/) for Android.

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