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Comment by invalidname | Hacker News Reader

Uno seems great. What surprised me is that it seems more successful than Codename One which has been around longer and works with Java/Kotlin.

If Java is more popular than C# (which pretty much every survey confirms), how come Codename One didn't pick up more traction. What did Codename One do wrong?

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Probably the #1 most popular, mature, and likely-to-actually-work-on-your-machine cross platform UI framework today is Flutter. And there are very few programmers out there who would otherwise be touching Dart (its implementation language) with a ten foot pole.

I understand that Hacker News is a place where "... written in Rust!" is often a sure technique for making a post reach the front page. But the reality is that implementation language has very loose coupling with real-life success.

Dart, if I remember rightly, was originally Google's attempt at replacing JavaScript. Embedding it in Chrome didn't happen so that's where the pivot to powering Flutter happened. I think it's one of those cases where it's less that there's anything wrong with the language, so much as it doesn't really have a reason to exist yet other than the one framework it is used in.

As far as these cross-platform frameworks go, being written in a popular language guarantees nothing. I've pointed out before there's a bunch of random obscure frameworks out there that use Python that have fairly low traction. Which always made me wonder why they were being created in the first place.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25490496

There even was a PHP one.

https://this-is-r-gaurav.medium.com/build-mobile-apps-with-p...

Can be any number of reasons, maybe Java shops do other things, like backend and biz logic.

C# can be natively compiled, doesn't it?

Codename One lets you do that with Java. Even more so since native on Android is Java...

I'm not sure I would say Java is native on Android. Sure, most Android apps run on the JVM, but it's not strictly necessary. Google has even released a Native Development Kit that lets you write code in C/C++.

https://developer.android.com/ndk/

This works through JNI. It will work fine as long as you don't use Java/Kotlin stuff. Then you will need to traverse back into the running VM. That has a serious overhead of going in/out of the VM. Since the Android UI is built in Java C code that tries to work with it is slower.

Notice that this isn't true for games which interact with the hardware directly in C. Only for high level UI stuff.

Sure. My point is, the hardware is not directly executing Java bytecode, so I don't think I would say Java is native to Android in the traditional sense of the word. Google themselves make the distinction between Java code and native code.

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