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The iPhone has to be concerned about power consumption, and as a general rule unleashing interpreters is risky because it allows "unnecessary" amounts of comput
by makecheck 18y ago
The iPhone has to be concerned about power consumption, and as a general rule unleashing interpreters is risky because it allows "unnecessary" amounts of computation to consume power.
Consider Flash video. While it would be nice, is it the most power-efficient way to display video? Ditto for games, or anything else that Flash is used for.
There is also the very real problem that Flash is abused for things that people don't want. Pointless intros, advertising, expensive animations...all consuming CPU in a way that is largely beyond the user's control. From the article: "websites that use Flash to render content or navigation won't work on the iPhone"...fine by me, I have never seen a site that did Flash navigation in a way that was more useful than default web navigation (instead, it was just...flashy).
- jcl 18y agoIt is unlikely that power consumption has anything to do with the restriction. For one thing, you can write wasteful code just as easily in a compiled language as in an interpreted language, and I have never heard of Apple rejecting an application because it computes in a wasteful fashion. And interpreted languages can run nearly as efficiently as compiled ones for many user-oriented tasks, because most of the time the application is in an idle state waiting for user input. This is why there is interpreted Java bytecode running on nearly every other phone. And the phone already interprets Javascript, which is even less efficient than Flash. If Apple is willing to let the user choose whether or not to waste their cycles browsing Javascript-heavy pages, why not give them the same option to run wasteful applications? No, this is entirely about controlling the routes of execution.