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Comment by androidinlimbo | Hacker News Reader

Android is in limbo, we need better free open source alternative.

The Android Open Source Project is awesome. It's not hard to compile it yourself and run it on a pixel 9. The issue is the hardware imo. (And some of the apps in AOSP really suck, but the actual OS is great imo)

The userspace being tied to the JVM is a massive pain. Certainly it's a lot harder to bind to than any other OS's system libraries.

How so?? JVM bytecode should be much easier to bind to, as the existence of JVM alternative runtimes for nearly every language shows.

Unless you're using a language that's specifically compile-to-jvm (e.g. Java, Kotlin or similar), almost nobody is using those JVM alternative runtimes. They're usually second-class runtimes that don't run the entire ecosystem of the target langauge. React Native runs JavaScript in a separate JS VM, Flutter is compiling Dart to native code with emdedded runtime, and Rust UI code also compiles to a native binary.

The "lingua franca" for language bindings is the C ABI which every other OS's platform libraries (Win32/Cocoa/GTK) support.

> The "lingua franca" for language bindings is the C ABI which every other OS's platform libraries (Win32/Cocoa/GTK) support.

Which is more like half of an API, it doesn't specify lifetimes so basically anything behind a pointer is unusable in itself. That's why we have "hacks" like gobjects and such, and why using most of the bindings is only possible if you have a decent binding library.

Account created one hour ago just to make this comment. Make it on your real account.

Have you considered that people may join HackerNews who were not already on it?

And in particular, people might lurk for a long time without an account until one day a thread makes them want to comment so much that they go ahead and create an account to comment.

Although, the username they picked in this case does seem a bit specific to the topic of the single comment they wrote. So it remains to be seen if this particular case was a throwaway account only used once, or if they will keep it.

Also usernames/handles can be surprisingly hard. It seems reasonable to me that people would pick something related to what they are thinking about at the time.

What's way more likely is that they've created a sock puppet account though.

Have you considered googling what a sock puppet is?

See, both of us can make comments in that same condescending style, pretending to be polite.

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