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RoboVM was basically the competition of Xamarin and Xamarin killed it. RoboVM was cheaper and had a bigger market, since it targeted JVM developers. With RoboVM

RoboVM was basically the competition of Xamarin and Xamarin killed it. RoboVM was cheaper and had a bigger market, since it targeted JVM developers. With RoboVM you aren't even tied to Java the language, being entirely possible to use a language like Scala. And contrary to Xamarin, in order to use IntelliJ IDEA or Eclipse, or in other words the state of the art in IDEs, you didn't need to pay $999 per year, like you need for using Visual Studio with Xamarin. And RoboVM has been open-source, which brings with it benefits, like trust, trust because should things go wrong, you can always fork it. Well, now is the time for a fork and I hope it will happen.

johncolanduoni 11y ago
I think putting more effort into Avian would probably be time better spent. Their static code-gen is lacking (it currently just runs the JIT ahead of time, instead of taking more time with something like LLVM), but they've got a lot of things going for them including a superior GC.
- bcg1 11y ago
  I was wondering why no one mentioned Avian... I'm not a mobile developer so I wasn't sure, but I thought that it does the same thing essentially. Avian is a fantastic platform and the maintainers are true friends of free software, even though their license is as permissive as you can possibly get. https://github.com/ReadyTalk/avian https://github.com/ReadyTalk/avian
- joel_dice 11y ago
  I wrote most of the Avian VM, and I agree that the code generation is quite primitive compared to LLVM's. We've considered using LLVM as an alternative code generator, but hesitated partly because LLVM used to require a shadow stack to support accurate GC. I just checked they're latest docs[1], though, and it seems that there are other options now. All in all, adding LLVM support to Avian would be challenging but doable. However, Avian's generated code is already fast enough for most purposes, and it's not too hard to fall back to a bit of native code when you need maximum performance. My impression is that Java-on-iOS developers are less concerned about performance and more concerned with ease-of-use (e.g. tool integration) and convenient access to native APIs (e.g. Bro[2]). The RoboVM devs have apparently done a great job on both of those things. I sympathize with Zechner and the other RoboVM devs. Development on Avian was originally funded by the company I was working at since it neatly addressed a problem we had: extending the lifetime of a large body of client-side Java code in a world that was/is increasingly unfriendly to client-side Java. Once it was good enough for that purpose, there was no business reason to continue investing in it besides bug fixes and maintenance, so we had to move on to other things. I'd love to keep working on Avian full time and do cool stuff like an LLVM port or trace-based JIT compilation, but it's hard to justify when there are bills to pay. In my case, that means focusing primarily on other, income-producing projects. In RoboVM's case, it means trying a new approach to licensing to make development sustainable. I wish them luck with it. [1] http://llvm.org/docs/GarbageCollection.html http://llvm.org/docs/GarbageCollection.html [2] http://docs.robovm.com/advanced-topics/bro.html http://docs.robovm.com/advanced-topics/bro.html
pjmlp 11y ago
Xamarin hasn't killed anything. The RoboVM developer's realized that they couldn't count on the FOSS community to pay their bills and accepted the deal proposed by Xamarin. Next time something similar comes out, people should think about paying for support instead of threatening to fork and use for free. If anything, the freetards have killed it. EDIT: Typo someone => something similar
- michaelmrose 11y ago
  "we have seen competitors actively exploiting our good faith by using our open source code to compete with us directly in commercial products. On the flip side, we have received almost no meaningful contributions to our open source code." The first indicates that they unwisely picked a license that allowed their competitors to do that and hoped they would share out of the kindness of their heart, the second indicates that they failed to find people interested in working for free on their commercial product. Maybe if they had been less generous with their competitors they would have paid them money which could have made it possible to keep it free. So no the "freetards" didn't kill it and by using such terms instead of logical arguments you reveal the quality of your intellect.
  - oldmanjay 11y ago
    Your last sentence ruined the point you worked hard to build in the first three paragraphs.
- bad_user 11y ago
  You seem to show contempt for people preferring open-source platforms. Well, I for one refuse to build on top of proprietary platforms, because there have been countless of examples of people getting burned. One way people get burned is because of bait and switch strategies, often employed by companies (especially startups) in order to attract interest and grow their product in popularity and then breaking their original promise. Or sometimes the company gets acquired in an acquihire and the product simply vanishes. One famous and recent example is FoundationDB - I'm pretty sure that the people that invested time and resources in FoundationDB are sorry for doing it. I also don't see how the "freetards" killed RoboVM, but you seem to agree with me that RoboVM is dead.
s73v3r 11y ago
I doubt they're going to kill RoboVM. I don't think they care much about which language, just that you get your tools from them.

johncolanduoni 11y ago

I think putting more effort into Avian would probably be time better spent. Their static code-gen is lacking (it currently just runs the JIT ahead of time, instead of taking more time with something like LLVM), but they've got a lot of things going for them including a superior GC.

bcg1 11y ago
I was wondering why no one mentioned Avian... I'm not a mobile developer so I wasn't sure, but I thought that it does the same thing essentially. Avian is a fantastic platform and the maintainers are true friends of free software, even though their license is as permissive as you can possibly get. https://github.com/ReadyTalk/avian https://github.com/ReadyTalk/avian
joel_dice 11y ago
I wrote most of the Avian VM, and I agree that the code generation is quite primitive compared to LLVM's. We've considered using LLVM as an alternative code generator, but hesitated partly because LLVM used to require a shadow stack to support accurate GC. I just checked they're latest docs[1], though, and it seems that there are other options now. All in all, adding LLVM support to Avian would be challenging but doable. However, Avian's generated code is already fast enough for most purposes, and it's not too hard to fall back to a bit of native code when you need maximum performance. My impression is that Java-on-iOS developers are less concerned about performance and more concerned with ease-of-use (e.g. tool integration) and convenient access to native APIs (e.g. Bro[2]). The RoboVM devs have apparently done a great job on both of those things. I sympathize with Zechner and the other RoboVM devs. Development on Avian was originally funded by the company I was working at since it neatly addressed a problem we had: extending the lifetime of a large body of client-side Java code in a world that was/is increasingly unfriendly to client-side Java. Once it was good enough for that purpose, there was no business reason to continue investing in it besides bug fixes and maintenance, so we had to move on to other things. I'd love to keep working on Avian full time and do cool stuff like an LLVM port or trace-based JIT compilation, but it's hard to justify when there are bills to pay. In my case, that means focusing primarily on other, income-producing projects. In RoboVM's case, it means trying a new approach to licensing to make development sustainable. I wish them luck with it. [1] http://llvm.org/docs/GarbageCollection.html http://llvm.org/docs/GarbageCollection.html [2] http://docs.robovm.com/advanced-topics/bro.html http://docs.robovm.com/advanced-topics/bro.html

pjmlp 11y ago

Xamarin hasn't killed anything. The RoboVM developer's realized that they couldn't count on the FOSS community to pay their bills and accepted the deal proposed by Xamarin. Next time something similar comes out, people should think about paying for support instead of threatening to fork and use for free. If anything, the freetards have killed it. EDIT: Typo someone => something similar

michaelmrose 11y ago
"we have seen competitors actively exploiting our good faith by using our open source code to compete with us directly in commercial products. On the flip side, we have received almost no meaningful contributions to our open source code." The first indicates that they unwisely picked a license that allowed their competitors to do that and hoped they would share out of the kindness of their heart, the second indicates that they failed to find people interested in working for free on their commercial product. Maybe if they had been less generous with their competitors they would have paid them money which could have made it possible to keep it free. So no the "freetards" didn't kill it and by using such terms instead of logical arguments you reveal the quality of your intellect.
- oldmanjay 11y ago
  Your last sentence ruined the point you worked hard to build in the first three paragraphs.
bad_user 11y ago
You seem to show contempt for people preferring open-source platforms. Well, I for one refuse to build on top of proprietary platforms, because there have been countless of examples of people getting burned. One way people get burned is because of bait and switch strategies, often employed by companies (especially startups) in order to attract interest and grow their product in popularity and then breaking their original promise. Or sometimes the company gets acquired in an acquihire and the product simply vanishes. One famous and recent example is FoundationDB - I'm pretty sure that the people that invested time and resources in FoundationDB are sorry for doing it. I also don't see how the "freetards" killed RoboVM, but you seem to agree with me that RoboVM is dead.

s73v3r 11y ago

I doubt they're going to kill RoboVM. I don't think they care much about which language, just that you get your tools from them.