xamlhacker

Well, C++ ABI is a similar issue but not related to the Gtk+ ABI because Gtk+ is written in C.

On my machine, I get the following:

Firefox 30: 29ms

IE11: 227ms

Chrome (latest release): 127ms

Java 8 Nashorn (JJS): 512ms

Node (v0.11.13): 132ms

Altera and Xilinx are starting to support compiling OpenCL to FPGAs. Not sure how efficient that is, but that is at least a step towards unified programming environment of various types of devices.

Nice to see Qt advancing steadily. Hoping that QML perf was particularly increased. The new WinRT and WP8 integration is nice to see. QQuickWidget is also a good idea, will allow for gradual migration of legacy QWidget apps to the new QML based world.

The new QML-to-C++ compiler also sounds interesting. I guess it is compiling to a mixture of plain C++ where possible (eg: simple arithmetic where deducible) and calls to some internal interpreter API for other parts. Looks like the compiler is not yet open-source?

It depends. If you are installing CyanogenMod on your phone, then installing GApps is not very legal. However, Cyanogen team has been working with Google to get devices like the OnePlus One certified by Google and preloading them with fully legal GApps package.

Qt and particularly now QML (Qt Meta/Modeling Language), is an awesome framework and really happy that NASA picked Qt.

I guess mean and median happen to be very different in this case.

I am 100% sure they can be written in native code but don't have any reference to give you for now.

AFAIK they do. WinRT apps can be written in many languages including C++. And this is pure native C++ and not "managed" C++.

No it is not a competitor. In fact, it can be a nice addition to asm.js. asm.js compilers should be able to generate very efficient code from SIMD.js constructs.

You do realize that for most Android devices, "rooting" requires finding a security exploit first to allow escalation of priviledges to root? It is not officially a part of Android and is not really blessed by the OEMs.

From a policy/ethical perspective, if you have to find a security exploit first to completely own your device, how is Android OEM policies any different from Windows then?

Waiting for the VideoCore V :) I noticed that the Broadcom LTE offerings such as the M320 do not use VideoCore and instead use PowerVR 5XT. Is it because they were originally Renesas designs? Hoping to see more VideoCore action in the future :)

Thats well known and was reported by several big media outlets.

MS/Nokia deal hasn't gone through yet. Nokia handset divison is still part of Nokia and not part of MS yet. I believe they are waiting for approval from some governments such as China before they can complete the acquisition.

As the other poster responded, NDK is not limited to ARM. NDK makes it (mostly) easy to write C++ and then compile it to multiple ISAs (x86, ARM and MIPS) and then ship all the binaries in the same APK. When the APK is installed and run on the device, the device automatically picks the appropriate binary files in the APK.

If you have some code optimized for a particular ISA, say a function which uses ARM NEON, you also have APIs in the NDK which allow you to detect which ISA you are running on and dynamically load the appropriate for that particular architecture. However, this is an optional feature. For pure C/C++ code without ASM or platform-specific intrinsics, compiling for multiple ISAs is trivial using the NDK tools.

For Linux, did you try the Bumblebee project? I had some success with it. Once bumblebee is setup, if you want to use the Nvidia GPU for some program, you just launch it as follows: "optirun /path/to/your/program".

I don't develop for iOS so this one surprised me: "How many downloads on iPad, iPhone, iPod separately". Does Apple really not tell you the device breakup?

There is also S40 platform powering Nokia Asha pseudo-smartphones. S40 is not Symbian, it is a distinct OS.

Netflix already works on Linux and I use it everyday on Ubuntu under Firefox. Look up "Pipelight" plugin, which I understand is a Wine-based project to run Silverlight.