5 ms·
NeXT and its successor, the modern Apple, have done incredible things with low amounts of resources. It feels nothing short of miraculous that the first few iOS
by TazeTSchnitzel 3y ago
NeXT and its successor, the modern Apple, have done incredible things with low amounts of resources. It feels nothing short of miraculous that the first few iOS devices could do so much in just 128MiB of RAM. No Android device has ever managed with that little!
The power of Objective-C?
- johndoe0815 3y agoI thought the HTC Dream/G1 also had 128 MB RAM, but you're correct - it had 192 MB! :)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jaimex2 3y agoYeah but it couldn't multi-task could it?
- TazeTSchnitzel 3y agoI don't think an Android device with that much RAM would manage much multitasking. iPhone OS actually could multitask with jailbreaking, though you quickly discovered the limitations of that amount of RAM.
- saagarjha 3y agoThis is less of an issue today (although there aren't very many jailbreaks to take advantage of it) but back then it was pretty clear the device ran with very little RAM to spare. The best tweaks were fairly simple when it came to RAM usage but true multitasking or other things that stayed resident generally had a massive hit on system performance.
- pjmlp 3y agoWindows Phone and Symbian could.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mpweiher 3y agoWell, NeXTstep could multitask in 8MB of RAM. And do it well in 16MB.
- saagarjha 3y agoI mean the concept of multitasking takes basically no overhead. The question is what resources your "average app" takes. On NeXTSTEP those requirements were quite low.
- pjmlp 3y agoSymbian, Windows Phone did just fine with C++, and also .NET. The power of AOT compiled languages instead of plain interpreter. Apparently the original Android as it was bought by Google, was planned to use JavaScript, then they pivoted into Java, and it took decades until they got any kind of good AOT/JIT story (starting with Android 5).
- saagarjha 3y agoI would say it's more the power of incentives, really. Android has historically never had the performance investment that Apple has put on their platform. If anything, early Android was much closer to iOS in terms of hardware specs and diverged quickly as they were unable to keep their resource usage down.
- pjmlp 3y agoI wouldn't call the JIT, AOT and PGO efforts nothing, and stuff like project butter. On the other hand going with a basic Assembly interpreter for Dalvik, when Nokia and Sony-Ericson already had JIT compilers for Symbian, while claming Android was better, no comments. Likewise when comparing Symbian Series 60 3rd edition phones with Android.
- saagarjha 3y agoThere are plenty of smart people who work on Android system performance, unfortunately the work put into iOS overshadows it.