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The benefit over W^X is that they already have it in place and usable. A JIT, full-stop, is going to consume more battery in the general-purpose mobile case th
by eropple 9y ago
The benefit over W^X is that they already have it in place and usable.
A JIT, full-stop, is going to consume more battery in the general-purpose mobile case than compiled code will. Break-even points on performance certainly exist but mobile applications don't tend to run for that long. You might be okay with that tradeoff--and it is not an unreasonable one--but Apple does tend to prioritize battery life and performance over developer happiness on their mobile platform. And JIT and garbage collection are both red flags for iOS according to the people I know who've worked on the platform from a performance and a battery-life perspective.
"But dynamic languages"--Apple doesn't seem to care about dynamic languages, do they? Aside from JavaScript, which uses their own, tested, internally blessed, JavaScript runtime. Developers might get frothy about that--but iOS is where the users who actually pay for things are.