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Comment by Skroob | Hacker News Reader

I can't speak to Android SDK's maturity, but I can say that the foundation of the iOS SDK has been around a long time. All our Foundation classes are still prefixed with NS. Almost all of the most basic stuff, and even a lot of higher level stuff as well, has come over from MacOS X and NextStep before that.

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Yeah, OS X is an enormous, and often underestimated asset of Apple's. Put them on great footing from the very iPhone SDK.

On the NS prefix: Lots of fun to switch between iOS and OS X dev. Wrote my first OS X app a couple months ago and it was weird to stop using the UI prefix for all the view classes.

My big wish for the next major iOS SDK is to get bindings. Those are awesome on the desktop.

Yeah I took on a short Mac project a number of months back and got really messed up with the switch. The ubiquity of Core Animation on the iOS was what spoiled me I think. Don't hold your breath for bindings on iOS though. I'd rather have garbage collection anyway.

I'm sure garbage collection's on the way with the increases in processor and memory in iOS devices.

Lack of GC seems to be an artificial constraint designed to force dev's to take charge of a situation with very limited memory. Unless there was some major overhaul to the Foundation classes.

Am I way off?

I'd think it also has to do with battery life. Especially with long running apps.

> My big wish for the next major iOS SDK is to get bindings.

I wouldn't expect this. Honestly I'd expect things to go the other way: 10.7 maybe deprecating bindings on the Desktop for things like table and outline views. Particularly since they added NSTableViewDataSource/Delegate and NSOutlineViewDataSource/Delgate in 10.6.

Really? With bindings you get to write so much less glue code for labels, button states and other UI widgets. It's a dramatic time saver for UI minutiae.

I've never found myself wishing for bindings on the iPhone. Maybe when I'm using Core Data, but thats not too often. And even then, its relatively easy and quick to abstract it all away.

I want GC on the iPhone. Not for the GC itself, just so Apple will make NSPointerArray, NSHashTable and NSMapTable part of the public API.

I actually do like them for labels, button states, and other what I'll call "scalar" widgets.

For collections, though, I feel like they're more likely to get you into trouble than to actually solve your problems.

I think you could do something substantially less complicated/powerful than bindings for the cases that bindings handle well, though, and I'd rather Apple did some innovating there than bring bindings over to iOS.

I'm also with the other folk who would much prefer to see Garbage Collection first. I rarely get into trouble with the reference counting system, but when I do it usually takes me forever to track down why my app is crashing without a single line of code written by me in the stack trace. Usually it's because I assigned an autoreleased value to an ivar in an init method while failing to retain it (a stupid mistake that I still make once every few months even after 5 years of Cocoa/Cocoa Touch work).

I have seen bindings running on iOS, and it has massive potential, especially for areas like live updating of on-screen table rows etc. Fully expect them there soon.

Will be astonished if they get deprecated on desktop, too. Value is far too high.

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