IPhone PL lockdown | Hacker News Reader

IPhone PL lockdown

lambda-the-ultimate.org

27 pointsalrex0216 comments

One comment added something I didn't think about before: "Does Apple really wish to preclude using lex/yacc in iPhone applications?" Oh... but there are many more generators. Many apps that do networking may be partially built with some code generator for packet encoding/decoding.

I think people here have missed the quiet (but reasonable) explanation for the "no source languages but ours": that, to do background processing, Apple's going to have to assume that it completely controls and understands the runtime behavior of an app at the Obj-C runtime level.

Other runtimes (even those compiled to Obj-C, because they require additional runtime machinery) would break their assumptions, and thus their chance to do the low-level magic required to really throttle down apps.

Disappointing, yes. Was looking forward to MacRuby, but that won't happen until GC reaches the iPhone OS.

Could you elaborate a little on that? I'm just genuinely curious about what the "additional runtime machinery" is, what assumptions they make about runtime behavior, how those assumptions break with the outlawed methods, and what those assumptions allow them to do to improve the iPhone experience.

(edit: yikes, I didn't downmod you and I don't know why someone did)

I have not yet seen any even remotely official information source associating language/compiler/etc. restrictions with background processing, just a growing number of comments like yours claiming that there is multi-tasking magic (for which there is no available evidence or technical reason) and that said magic would fail in the face of alternate languages, compilers, etc.

Can you cite any references for your claims?

I'm afraid I'd better not comment in public (yes, that darned NDA) since I've read some of the new API docs.

But I freely admit my original comment was pure speculation.

iPads will never replace PCs. They won't even replace all the other tablets on the market. There will be even more types of devices in the future to try new programming language techniques on than there are today. Be pissed about not being able to do what you want on iPhone OS, but it's pointless to imagine some future world where that's the only option.

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