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Comment by Htsthbjig | Hacker News Reader

Is very interesting how people on Microsoft got to the same conclusions that we got: get rid of Java and any other exotic language in the sharing code and use only c++.

Use other languages in the interface for different platforms,or in the testbench code.

We got to this conclusion after years of painful practical problems, but it is hard because it goes against the common philosophy of theoretical people that write best practice books(but not code too much) and natural inclinations of programmers(to use the new shiny thing).

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We started like this, sort of a gamble, and until now it never gave us major problems. So it's indeed a sort of relief to see other companies use this road as well.

The core of our software is grabbing data from an external device and signal processing. On top of that we've built a plain C API, an plain C RPC lib over TCP with the same interface as the main C API, and a C++/CLI dll for interfacing with .Net. On top of that we've built the main C# ui and a lot of custom applications in C/C++/Labview/Matlab/Python. And it all just works which makes me wonder wether there even were other choices than C++ for this particular job.

You can not share Java on all platforms (such as iOS). Unfortunately if you want to share code on Windows/OSX/Android/iOS C/C++ are you only options.

Wow, but wasn't Java supposed to be "write once, run everywhere?!!?"

Yeah.

It's kind of hard to be "Write Once, Run Anywhere" when someone with control over the platform only allows specific runtimes. Of course there are tools that would allow you to write Java for an iOS app and transpile to Obj-C, but you can't directly run Java bytecode for an iOS app.

True for iOS, certainly

And for good reasons. Reminds me of the initial complaint about "no flash in iPhone", then someone managed to put it in an Android tablet and then they realised what a bad idea it is.

I want to know why the EU hasn't come down on Apple over this. They're shutting out Flash and Java and yet Google get nailed to the floor despite supporting a pretty liberal, almost completely open source mobile OS.

Because Apple is not close to having a monopoly like Google?

>I want to know why the EU hasn't come down on Apple over this.

Because it's their platform, and they are not a monopoly in the mobile market (more like 20-30% in EU).

>* They're shutting out Flash and Java*

Yes, amen to that (though it's: Flash and Java applets).

>and yet Google get nailed to the floor despite supporting a pretty liberal, almost completely open source mobile OS.

Well, "almost" is the key word. The main value proposition behind Android is in the Google apps integration, and Google is very adamant about who and how gets that in a MS circa 1995 way.

Besides, the reasons they "nail" Google to the floor has nothing to do with Android, but about it's monopoly on search and the abuses of it.

You are conflating 2 different issues. Apple is a walled garden platform, but while initially it seemed they had a monopoly, google has a much more popular platform in terms of users. However, Google does have a search monopoly, which is why the EU is taking an interest.

There are native Java compilers for iOS.

Java the language specification != JVM bytecode.

Did I not make that clear? I specified you can write Java the language but you're not running Java the bytecode...

Except compilers like Codename One and RoboVM take bytecode as input and generate native code.

There isn't any transpilation to Objective-C involved.

It is, as long as anyone bothers to write a compiler.

You can!

http://www.codenameone.com/

http://www.robovm.com/

> and natural inclinations of programmers(to use the new shiny thing).

It seems like C++ keeps getting shinier. Though organizations might try to stick to a limited subset of C++ anyway.

> It seems like C++ keeps getting shinier. Though organizations might try to stick to a limited subset of C++ anyway.

I agree with both points. And I'm glad the shiny new parts of C++ are very usable

For the parts that are still missing I have found the Boost library to help round it out in a cross platform sort of way. (http://www.boost.org/)

Java is not the problem.

Oracle ignoring the mobile OS eco-sytems and not providing either JVM or AOT compilers is the problem.

Java had a mobile VM before Android even existed. They even bragged about how much better it was than Dalvik when Android started taking off.

And now Android looks just like the return of J2ME fragmentation hell. With each version and device having its own set of device specific APIs, bugs and quirks.

Why keep people mixing languages with implementations?!!

The mobile VM you speak about, were the J2ME VMs, usually done by the device manufacturers themselves, not by Sun.

Java, The Programming Language Specification does not require the Java Virtual Machine Specification to run. Any implementer is free to take any approach to turn Java code into executable code.

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