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Comment by therockhead | Hacker News Reader

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.

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You can!

http://www.codenameone.com/

http://www.robovm.com/

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.

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