Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

There's a lot of editorial speculation in this article:

> it was widely held among Android Enthusiasts that Samsung was rising up to fight back against the iPhone establishment, a sort of patron saint for Android. That was crazy

Way to classify an entire group of people :/

> Apple also had clear insight into whether or not a 64-bit SoC would be beneficial in accelerating apps. Qualcomm didn't run an App Store and wasn't maintaining a consumer mobile operating system.

They couldn't have, as none of the apps could run on the platform yet.

> while an original intent of LLVM was to bring the Mac's Objective-C language up to par with other languages in compiler sophistication

Lol, it was to move away from GPL tooling…

> Apple shared the Clang LLVM front end compiler for C, C++, and Objective-C as an open-source project in 2007, but it wasn't 2012 that it started to be widely adopted by various Unix distributions. It didn't become the default compiler for Android until 2016. In part, that's because Google wasn't creating Android to be a great product, but rather to simply serve as a good enough product to facilitate the development of a mobile platform it could tap into as an advertising platform without any restrictions imposed by Microsoft or Apple.

…

Honestly, it reads like a strung-together exercise to prove that Apple is "the best".

>Honestly, it reads like a strung-together exercise to prove that Apple is "the best"…

That is what you expect from DED ( Its Author ) and Appleinsider.

Both should have no place on HN. The same goes for WccfTech.

"flag" is there for a reason.

And I did even before replying, but seeing it on Front page and currently sitting at the top hurts me.

It's gone now.

> Lol, it was to move away from GPL tooling

GPL was a factor, but Apple didn’t move to LLVM just to avoid open-sourcing their tools (in fact, they’ve open-sourced nearly all of their LLVM-backed tooling). GCC is not very extensible and difficult to integrate into other tools (and IIRC Stallman rejected patches that tried to change this because he didn’t want non-GPL tools to be able to interact with GCC). Clang/LLVM on the other hand has a very modular design that enables e.g. seamless IDE integration for syntax highlighting/code completion (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clang#Design).

The flexibility of LLVM is evident if you look Apple’s programming language history: a few years after hiring Chris Lattner and moving to LLVM, Apple developed Xcode 4 (which included massive improvements to the source editor because of Clang integration), quite a few extensions to Objective-C (such as automatic reference counting), LLDB, the Metal shading language, and Swift. Most of these projects are open source.

That being said, I agree with your conclusion that the author seems to be trying to prove “Apple is the best”.

It's because of the GPL3 and the "tivoization" clause. Apple was stuck on GCC 4.2, the last GPL2 version, for a very long time because subsequent versions made the move to GPL3. LLVM and Clang were the way Apple could move past having an obsolete toolchain.

Based on what happened with Apple and PowerPC in the '90s, I have to assume that if the roles were reversed now and Android phones had the processor performance lead, it would be continuously trumpeted by every pro-Android outlet in the same way.

Oh, they certainly did talk about benchmarks back when they had a lead. It doesn't make it all that useful…

Don't forget the part where they said Samsung is Darth Vader fighting against Apple.

Hard to take an article seriously with that kind of hyperbole.

what a joke.

really?

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