ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Zisu Andrei <matzipan@xxxxxxxxx>]

Well, lua needs a wrapper/api,  just like js has the dom, node.js and qt.
so... No problem there.

It took me a while to read the article.

I personally think the v8/c++ mix is usually a really good idea, allowing
for any lightweight interface manipulation to take place in js and let c++
do the rest of the heavy lifting....

That would not keep you safe from gc'ing though... But if you require
anything high performance, you will probably not even use js anyway. The
problem with android is that you don't have that choice. But we do!

I kind of feel bad about mozilla pushing for asm.js though.... If you're
trying so hard to speedup js, and you're compiling c++ to js and halven the
speed. Why not just keep it c++?

On Monday, July 15, 2013, Josh Leverette wrote:

> Yeah, I really enjoy python programming myself. Shed Skin in particular
> has promise to make python on mobile need less overhead. PyPy should have
> long ago replaced CPython as the default interpreter, in my opinion, and
> PyPy might be good enough to make interpreted python on mobile bearable,
> but they're just now developing ARM support.
>
> From what I hear, Lua has a stupidly simple VM that's really high
> performance, and the language itself is really powerful, but there's
> virtually no documentation about using it to write standalone programs. It
> is just an extension language for existing apps, pretty much... which is
> sad, but oh well.
> On Jul 15, 2013 12:09 AM, "Luke Bryan" <luke32j@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Thanks for the info! That's an interesting article on Javascript and
> performance. It seems low memory of mobiles, and better performance, are
> the reason Ubuntu will be going with mostly Qt/c++ for mobile apps? I'm
> more of a fan of Python/Java programming, but I can see why this may be
> beneficial. I hope Pyside/QML will be available at least for Ubuntu-phone,
> that would be very handy.
>
> Best regards,
> Luke
> ------------------------------
> Date: Sun, 14 Jul 2013 18:11:39 -0500
> Subject: Re: [Ubuntu-phone] Memory question
> From: coder543@xxxxxxxxx
> To: luke32j@xxxxxxx
> CC: ubuntu-phone@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>
> Java is hardly the major multicore programming language. Let's get that
> out of the way first. Also, libreoffice has been rewritten into C++ over
> the last few years. If any Java remains, it is rapidly becoming
> inconsequential. I do agree it has been the dominant platform for dumbphone
> apps, but that has zero impact on Ubuntu. As far as smartphone apps... No.
> The java language is being used on Android, but it's using the Dalvik VM,
> not standard Java libraries and all that. We couldn't support those apps
> even if we wanted to. It would be a terrible plan. This has been discussed
> numerous times on the mailing list -- use Google to search the mailing list
> if you have to. Why would you have to use JavaScript web workers? Why would
> those even be helpful? JavaScript is not Java, at all. It's actually
> ECMAScript even though it goes by the misnomer of JavaScript, but I still
> don't see why those would be necessary when you can simply write some
> multicore C++, or C, or whatever. Go and Rust are perfectly capable
> multicore oriented languages too.
>
> Java is unnecessary, but more importantly, it has bad performance
> characteristics. It needs significant amounts of RAM to avoid the garbage
> collector thrashing the CPU. This article goes into great depth about why
> Java and JavaScript naturally perform poorly on mobile devices:
> http://sealedabstract.com/rants/why-mobile-web-apps-are-slow/
>
> The guy is very wrong about some of the hardware aspects in that article,
> particularly regarding the relative speeds of ARM and x86, but his analysis
> of the software side of things is fairly competent.
>
> Ubuntu touch is centered around Qt, being coded in a combination of QML,
> JavaScript, and C++, with any combination of those languages or just one.
> On Jul 14, 2013 6:01 PM, "Luke Bryan" <luke32j@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> What do you mean by, Ubuntu won't use Java? Java has been *the* major
> multi-core programming language, *the* platform for smartphone and
> "dumb-phones" apps, and has come with Ubuntu by default, for a long time
> now. So will Java, and apps like LibreOffice now be unsupported? Will we
> have to use Javascript web-workers instead, for high performance multicore
> applications?
>
> Best regards
> Luke
>
> ------------------------------
> Date: Sat, 13 Jul 2013 21:15:03 +0200
> Subject: Re: [Ubuntu-phone] Memory question
> From: gianguidorama@xxxxxxxxx
> To: coder543@xxxxxxxxx
> CC: ubuntu-phone@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx; luke32j@xxxxxxx
>
> And after all Ubuntu doesn't use Java, so I think that memory consumption
> will remain at a reasonable level.
> Il giorno 13/lug/2013 21:06, "Josh Leverette" <coder543@xxxxxxxxx> ha
> scritto:
>
> Android only does that when it has to, meaning devices with low memory
> available. I'm sure Ubuntu will kill apps when it has to, and not a moment
> sooner.
>
> Sincerely,
>
>

-- 
Zisu Andrei