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No, if anything, Firefox is proof that you can write a bad 'native application' in C directly with the APIs provided by the OS. It's entirely possible to write
by tumult 17y ago
No, if anything, Firefox is proof that you can write a bad 'native application' in C directly with the APIs provided by the OS. It's entirely possible to write something that is more native than Firefox but is based on another language, like Ruby, a Lisp, ML, etc.
- tedunangst 17y agoFirefox isn't written directly on top of the OS APIs. It's written on top of NSPR (Netscape Portable Runtime) on the bottom, with layers of more compat piled on top.
- tumult 17y agoAnd NSPR is written in C as a thin layer over the OS APIs. Just because it's C doesn't magically imbue whatever uses it with super-awesome-native qualities.
- celticjames 17y agoIt's more accurate to say that Firefox 3.6 is written on top of the Mozilla 1.9.1 platform, which includes technologies such as NSPR or XPCOM for some low level system interaction. I don't think anything at the UI rendering level uses those technologies.