Writing Ubuntu Phone Apps Seem Fairly Easy

[Luke_Wolf]

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.

The problem is Javascript is the new Perl, a tool that is decent at it's specific domain, but has gained a following that thinks that it should be used everywhere, while not being a general purpose language. It primarily gets this focus as a result of having a monopoly on the client side of the Web, and thus forced "popularity", because people want to run stuff across the web.

Once you move beyond a couple hundred LOC JavaScript projects quickly turn unmanageable because while you can force the issue, JavaScript really isn't designed around things like multi-file paradigms, and it seems to tend to promote God Functions for example $() in JQuery (And Document.Ready() tends to become a God Function all it's own with multi-layered anonymous functions and so on), which most best practice handbooks are going to tell you is a Really Bad Thing(tm). That's not even to get into the problem that Javascript can work differently on different browsers, which means lots of manual integration testing.

As a result, this, combined with the inherent hostility towards tooling that dynamic languages present, make the idea of JavaScript being dominant outside the web client a nightmare to me, but with the changes going on in the ecosystem I don't see the momentum in that direction lasting.

[pal666]

developer time costs more than hardware

only when you develop for one customer

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

they are still limited by battery

JavaScript and Python are modern languages. nobody wants to compile code anymore

in reality both mobile and cloud servers caused renaissance of real resource-conscious languages

dynamic languages + tdd beat static typing

defective by design can't beat correct by design. it only makes fedora installer fail in production with exception "this object does not have that member", which wouldn't even compile in real language

dynamic languages are advancing at great speed. they're quite likely faster than native in near future

they are "advancing" only when you don't measure and throw unsupported statements. and they have no hope at all. and they have other features which make them slow besides dynamic typing

all the computationally heavy runs in the cloud

which, as i already said, makes ten times slower app ten times more expensive to run.

[pal666]

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.

no, it is not. this bullshit can be perpetuated only by people who had never run any real optimizing compiler and don't know that heavy optimization is very resource hungry. the fact is, jit makes for slow memory hogs. even google understood it and switched to aot

[pal666]

thanks to good VMs the performance is much better

just look at resource usage of your browser and stop repeating this bullshit

[caligula]

no, it is not. this bullshit can be perpetuated only by people who had never run any real optimizing compiler and don't know that heavy optimization is very resource hungry. the fact is, jit makes for slow memory hogs. even google understood it and switched to aot

Please educate yourself about dynamic dispatch, vtables and profile guided optimization before making such claims. JIT can dynamically recompile dynamic dispatch into direct static dispatch, then inline further. This isn't possible without JIT.

[caligula]

just look at resource usage of your browser and stop repeating this bullshit

What resources? Cpu time? Sure that's an issue and will be fixed with better JIT. Memory? No. Memory is cheap and we are only at the beginning of 64bit address space exhaustion. I suspect netbooks running the browser will have 128GB ram in few years.

[JS987]

What resources? Cpu time? Sure that's an issue and will be fixed with better JIT. Memory? No. Memory is cheap and we are only at the beginning of 64bit address space exhaustion. I suspect netbooks running the browser will have 128GB ram in few years.

There will be never JIT with near zero memory and CPU usage. RAM is twice as expensive as 2 years ago. CPU caches are less efficient with higher memory usage.

[JS987]

Please educate yourself about dynamic dispatch, vtables and profile guided optimization before making such claims. JIT can dynamically recompile dynamic dispatch into direct static dispatch, then inline further. This isn't possible without JIT.

It doesn't seem to help in real applications like Qt Creator (C++) versus Netbeans (Java).

[duby229]

What resources? Cpu time? Sure that's an issue and will be fixed with better JIT. Memory? No. Memory is cheap and we are only at the beginning of 64bit address space exhaustion. I suspect netbooks running the browser will have 128GB ram in few years.

128GB in a few years? In a netbook? Cool. I can't wait. The future somehow seems less bleak.

EDIT: seems like DDR3 lasted waaaay too long.

[JS987]

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

upcoming non-expensive Motorola Moto E (2015) will have 1.2 GHz quad core and 1 GB RAM

http://www.gsmarena.com/motorola_moto_e_(2015)-6986.php