Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

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My own language, Hecl, is written in Java, is no way as fast as the C version of Lua, and yet it provides acceptable speeds for apps on phones that are slower than the iPhone. Just don't try and write an action game in Hecl - save it for the configuration and level descriptions or something. So I don't think that speed is an issue for most applications; Lua is plenty fast.

I'm not 100% sure, but my experience has been that scripting languages are more compact in terms of code:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all...

In terms of the API, well, that depends entirely on the project and their goals! A small, decent team of open source developers could probably cover most of the API in less than a year without particularly working that hard on it.

The real problem here is that interpreters for the iPhone seem to be a gray area at best (see discussion elsewhere here).

Anyway, looks like good work, and I think interpreters on phones are a great idea:-)

> I'm not 100% sure, but my experience has been that scripting languages are more compact in terms of code:

This is obvious. That's what they are for. But on the iPhone the tedious stuff is dealing with the APIs. And you would not gain much just by wrapping them with another language.

> The real problem here is that interpreters for the iPhone seem to be a gray area at best (see discussion elsewhere here).

As I have stated many times in other threads, there are apps (published on the Appstore) written with squeak smalltalk, games made with Unity (which uses javascript on top of Mono for scripting the game logic) etc.

What you can't do is to expose the interpreter to the user or to make it run code downloaded from the web.

Even if this wasn't the case, how could Apple even know, for instance, that I have statically compiled the Lua interpreter and used it to script part of the logic of my app?

I don't know Objective C very well (the last time I looked at it was in 1998, when it was probably at its low point, between Next and Apple), but with Java, Hecl definitely provides a more compact API to deal with many of the system API's.

In other words, the compactness translates to dealing with system APIs in many cases too.

BTW, dove sei? Io vivo a Padova. Non sarebbe male fare un HN Italy qualche volta...

Check my profile. p.s. Comunque sono a Roma. Se passi da queste parti, molto volentieri.

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