Writing Ubuntu Phone Apps Seem Fairly Easy

[Luke_Wolf]

Well...

I perceive QML + C++ as best possible option right now. UI written in something completely declarative and underlying algorithms written in C++. C++ is still a high-level language, but requires a bit of trickery and experience. That blocks script-kiddies from throwing a ton of shit to the store (like we have in Android). Want something simple? Use QML. Need performance? Add C++ parts.

I really see garbage colletor as purposeless resource waster - I moved from python to C++11/14 as a developer, and the easyness of memory management with smart pointers makes GC pointless, especially when you realize how it is implemented (traversing the graph of references and pointers, detecting unaccesible cycles, etc.). That's why iOS is snappy on a not-so-powerful hardware and Android and WP lags on even the best hardware - they use their vm's everywhere, what wastes resources.

And yes - I prefer Ubuntu to resemble iOS and OS X, than Windows and Android. I wan't it to be pleasurable for users, not for lazy developers, for who learning memory management is an unsolvable problem.

Well...

Not having a garbage collector didn't stop iOS from being flooded with fart apps, and as of Android Lollipop, and Windows 8.1/Windows Phone 8, all applications are AoT compiled as opposed to JITed on the device they're running on. Android had the additional problem of course that Dalvik is slow. IMO it's more important to make it easier to create great things than to intentionally try to limit the market, because people are going to create stupid stuff regardless, because stupid stuff is going to continue to become insanely popular for inane reasons (angry birds, flappy bird,...).

[curaga]

1. phones are 8-core now at 2.5 GHz and 192 core gpu (NVIDIA). They also support 64bit arm so more than 4GB of memory available. Not really tiny machines anymore

Good for you for having a Tegra K1, too bad nobody else has that. Android has 76% installed base [1], 58.7% of all Android devices in use are Jelly bean or lower. 14.2% are ICS or lower.
Tegra K1 shipped with Android 4.4, guess what capacity phones the majority is using.


[1] http://communities-dominate.blogs.co...odbath-q4.html
[2] https://developer.android.com/about/...rds/index.html

[mitcoes]

Open drivers for mobile

AND if they are not shipping any phones with fully free drivers... then Ubuntu phone is completely dead on arival. What exactly is their market then? Dissatisfied iPhone users? Seriously?

It is very difficult to find any HARDWARE provider that would make a open source driver phone device.

That is why Canonical decided to make MIR in order to use android blobs, and save the effort to make new drivers to the OEMs.

Android itself is not as open because the hardware as you cannot even download the closed drivers for your device in order to cook your own rom, or install any of the available ones (what no so many people would do). Even Intel SoC tablets where you can install desktop GNU/Linux, and not easily, do not provide drivers for some parts, and any distro with Gnome or KDE would be interested in being preinstalled as an option on those 7" 100 USD Intel SoC tablets and others.

Of course some politician, in a big market, some day would ask for open source firmware and open source drivers bill, at least at the beginning tax far more not open source firmware and drivers devices, and far less the now almost none open source firmware and drivers devices.

That day when hardware will be almost all with open specs, open source firmware and open source drivers, open software OSs would be even better than today are, but not even China, the BRICS the EU or California is asking that after the HDD and SDD NSA firmware spygate, it seems there are not a good understanding inside the political environment of how dangerous is not to have open specs and open source drivers for our hardware.

[Luke_Wolf]

It is very difficult to find any HARDWARE provider that would make a open source driver phone device.

That is why Canonical decided to make MIR in order to use android blobs, and save the effort to make new drivers to the OEMs.

Android itself is not as open because the hardware as you cannot even download the closed drivers for your device in order to cook your own rom, or install any of the available ones (what no so many people would do). Even Intel SoC tablets where you can install desktop GNU/Linux, and not easily, do not provide drivers for some parts, and any distro with Gnome or KDE would be interested in being preinstalled as an option on those 7" 100 USD Intel SoC tablets and others.

Of course some politician, in a big market, some day would ask for open source firmware and open source drivers bill, at least at the beginning tax far more not open source firmware and drivers devices, and far less the now almost none open source firmware and drivers devices.

That day when hardware will be almost all with open specs, open source firmware and open source drivers, open software OSs would be even better than today are, but not even China, the BRICS the EU or California is asking that after the HDD and SDD NSA firmware spygate, it seems there are not a good understanding inside the political environment of how dangerous is not to have open specs and open source drivers for our hardware.

OBJECTION!

The component you're referring to: LibHybris, was originally created for and by Wayland development, the true rationale behind Mir is still unknown at this time.

[caligula]

dynamic languages are advancing at great speed. they're quite likely faster than native in near future ?? Did you forget to take your meds? Do you even know shit about what you're talking about?

If you consider object oriented languages, there are cases with dynamic dispatch where JIT beats C++ style statically typed code even with profile guided optimizations. It's a fact.

There is also lots of academic research going on around JavaScript style languages. E.g. automatic type inference, gradual typing, hybrid typing (=types only when you need them, combination of dynamic and static). There is also lots of financial support from companies. Facebook invested in new dynamic runtime (Hack, Hiphop etc.), Mozilla believes in Javascript. Basically all browser manufacturers invest in JavaScript. People also emscripten compile everything to Javascript. Java/Scala guys compile to Javascript. There's also Kotlin. They refuse to use their old static platform (OpenJDK / Oracle JVM) due to much better future with JavaScript. Unity3d uses dynamic scripting. QML is JavaScript.

[caligula]

Yeah, it of course depends on what you want to do - If you for example want to run heavy numerical modeling native could would be of course faster. But then you have numpy & co for that.

Take a look at Julia language: http://julialang.org/
For benchmarks also LuaJIT or ASM.js. LuaJIT has small community and poor developers and it still beats many static compilers.

[MartinK]

OBJECTION!

The component you're referring to: LibHybris, was originally created for and by Wayland development, the true rationale behind Mir is still unknown at this time.

Yeah, it has been written by people from Jolla (mostly Carsten "stskeeps" Munk & co.) and used just fine on the Jolla smartphone since its public release in November 2013. Als the upcoming Jolla Tablet will use the binary Android x86 drivers as they are unfortunately more tested and have better performance than the available open drivers for the tablet hardware.

[dh04000]

Yeah, it has been written by people from Jolla (mostly Carsten "stskeeps" Munk & co.) and used just fine on the Jolla smartphone since its public release in November 2013. Als the upcoming Jolla Tablet will use the binary Android x86 drivers as they are unfortunately more tested and have better performance than the available open drivers for the tablet hardware.

Why would anyone using a proprietary closed sourced OS care if the gpu drivers are open? Nothing but the linux core is open, it is as locked down as android.

[Luke_Wolf]

If you consider object oriented languages, there are cases with dynamic dispatch where JIT beats C++ style statically typed code even with profile guided optimizations. It's a fact.

There is also lots of academic research going on around JavaScript style languages. E.g. automatic type inference, gradual typing, hybrid typing (=types only when you need them, combination of dynamic and static). There is also lots of financial support from companies. Facebook invested in new dynamic runtime (Hack, Hiphop etc.), Mozilla believes in Javascript. Basically all browser manufacturers invest in JavaScript. People also emscripten compile everything to Javascript. Java/Scala guys compile to Javascript. There's also Kotlin. They refuse to use their old static platform (OpenJDK / Oracle JVM) due to much better future with JavaScript. Unity3d uses dynamic scripting. QML is JavaScript.

JavaScript... "a better future"... are you... insane... or have you never tried a statically typed OOP language designed with tooling in mind like C#? A JavaScript future is about the darkest future I can possibly imagine as a developer. It's an okay but not wonderful language for the domain it was originally designed for, which is providing client side interactivity to XML documents, when you move beyond that it becomes a situation where you're using a hammer to drive in screws. Oh sure you can do it but you're going to violate all best practices and be using the wrong tool for the job, as well as having a hard time performing the action itself.

[caligula]

JavaScript... "a better future"... are you... insane... or have you never tried a statically typed OOP language designed with tooling in mind like C#? A JavaScript future is about the darkest future I can possibly imagine as a developer. It's an okay but not wonderful language for the domain it was originally designed for, which is providing client side interactivity to XML documents, when you move beyond that it becomes a situation where you're using a hammer to drive in screws. Oh sure you can do it but you're going to violate all best practices and be using the wrong tool for the job, as well as having a hard time performing the action itself.

I'm just telling how the world sees JavaScript. It's gaining momentum and actually thanks to good VMs the performance is much better than e.g. Ruby/Python. Even PHP had to improve speed, otherwise it would have lost. People even use JS on server side (node.js). I don't know if this is good or bad. It's just something that is happening out there.