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Its absolutely crazy to me that both major mobile platforms don't have APIs that are available with bindings for all major languages. Forcing developers to use

Its absolutely crazy to me that both major mobile platforms don't have APIs that are available with bindings for all major languages. Forcing developers to use Java on android (A VM on a low powered platform), and ObjectiveC/Swift(Languages that are barely used on other platforms) is so hostile to developers.

Klonoar 3y ago
I mean, hang on there... Objective-C, while probably frustrating to get started with, is literally "just about C". Projects have been doing Objective-C interop for decades now, very similar to what is being done in the posted article. It's not really gated off at a programming layer, moreso in how Apple's been so frustrating about developing on non-Apple hardware. It's not exactly what I would call "hostile", language-wise. Swift, on the other hand, might be a bigger barrier...
- jwells89 3y ago
  Yeah, bindings for UIKit aren’t actually all that challenging to write. There’s quite a number of UIKit apps written at least partially in languages other than Obj-C/Swift. Android Framework on the other hand is not great in this department. Practically speaking it’s just Java and Kotlin. I wish I could write Swift there because even if Kotlin is similar syntactically the JVM baggage can be irritating.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
wk_end 3y ago
Complaining about the JVM on Android ("a low powered platform") feels like a take that's about 10-15 years out of date. A modern Android phone is several orders of magnitude more powerful, however you might want to measure that, than the machines that Java was first designed for. And anyway, Android doesn't really use a VM anymore - it's been AOT compiling apps on installation for around a decade. There's about a billion things about developing on Android that are absolutely miserable. HLL-induced perf bottlenecks aren't usually one of them.
- phendrenad2 3y ago
  I don't think GP's complaint is about Java and Swift being unperformant, I think the complaint is that you can't use the language of your choice easily. If we just had a C API we could interpret Ruby or Python with a standard interpreter. But instead, if you want to write a Ruby or Python mobile app, you need to translate objects between the language of your choice and Java/ObjC.
  - iainmerrick 3y ago
    Right -- Android does have a C API but it’s a pain to use and really incomplete: https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/stable_apis https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/stable_apis If you want to do anything else you need JNI which is an even bigger pain. I don’t really understand why the Android team haven’t made it easy to call any Java API from C, with auto-generated bindings or some such. I think they just don’t believe in apps using native code, beyond the special case of games (note that pretty much all the native APIs are to do with low-level graphics and sound).
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      You don't need to wonder, it is quite explicity mentioned on the NDK documentation. "The Android NDK is a toolset that lets you implement parts of your app in native code, using languages such as C and C++. For certain types of apps, this can help you reuse code libraries written in those languages." -- https://developer.android.com/ndk https://developer.android.com/ndk "The NDK may not be appropriate for most novice Android programmers who need to use only Java code and framework APIs to develop their apps. However, the NDK can be useful for cases in which you need to do one or more of the following: - Squeeze extra performance out of a device to achieve low latency or run computationally intensive applications, such as games or physics simulations. - Reuse your own or other developers' C or C++ libraries. " -- https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides There is also the security aspect, why they discourage the use of those languages for full blown applications.
      - 3y ago
steve1977 3y ago
Objective-C and Swift are used all over the Apple platforms, including desktop macOS. So „barely used“ on other platforms is not really true. Also considering the number of iOS devices, those two languages are probably more usable in practice than for example C#, even if the latter is cross-platform.
- dreamcompiler 3y ago
  "barely used on other platforms" clearly meant (to me anyway) barely used on non-Apple platforms. They're not terrible languages, but they're pretty uncommon outside the Apple ecosystem.
  - steve1977 3y ago
    But the Apple ecosystem is huge. It’s just much more consumer-oriented, in contrast to „corporate“ languages like Java and C#.
rectang 3y ago
The interests of platform vendors and application developers are not aligned. Platform vendors seek to lock in developers and discourage development on competing platforms, while developers wish to leverage their skills portably across multiple platforms.
- sdflhasjd 3y ago
  Google do maintain Flutter though, which is effectively a competitor.
- astrange 3y ago
  Google isn't capable of aligning itself with its own mission, let alone locking in developers. They'll sooner release 10 programming platforms invented for 10 new messaging apps.
cellularmitosis 3y ago
This isn’t so crazy. Apple doesn’t want developers creating a bunch of slow, bloated, interpreted apps.
- akmarinov 3y ago
  They really don’t care. Source: every airline app ever, every Cordova or most RN apps As long as they tie into bringing Apple money- it’s fair game
pjmlp 3y ago
Not kept up with the times? Since Android 5, with ART introduction, that Android uses a mix of AOT/JIT code. Java was invented for low end IoT, there isn't anything more low powered than anything in the last 20 years of mobile computing. Apple and Google should be cherished by not keeping the old C and C++ song of POSIX tunes going. As Rob Pike puts it, it is like only listening to David Cassidy records.
no_wizard 3y ago
Given that Swift is open source, I'm surprised Android hasn't made it a 1st party alternative to using Kotlin. They could capture alot more developers this way, as learning 1 language for both mobile platforms would facilitate more iOS only apps (there are many still even today) to get ported to Android. This may finally make Android tablets viable, as the app ecosystem for tablets isn't as good as iPadOS
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Android has 70% of the world market, there is no reason to care about Swift. Also Kotlin and Android Studio are mostly developed by JetBrains that is in bed with Google for Android tooling, if anything I expect more Google acquiring JetBrains than supporting Swift on Android.
- cxr 3y ago
  Objective-C has been open source for even longer, and Cocoa and the associated mobile toolkits eminently clonable. I'm rather more surprised that Google didn't make an 80/20 iOS compatibility toolkit 15 years ago. If they didn't do that then when iOS was dominating the hearts and minds of pretty much every developer behind any noteworthy mobile app, then I wouldn't expect them to make Swift a first-class priority today, when Android has basically "won" on the global scale.
dagmx 3y ago
It's really trivial to use ObjC from any language with a CFFI. and in turn really trivial to expose Swift to ObjC as well, so to other languages. Just some examples of bindings: Python https://pypi.org/project/pyobjc/ https://pypi.org/project/pyobjc/ Rust https://docs.rs/objc/latest/objc/ https://docs.rs/objc/latest/objc/ C# https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/xamarin/ios/get-started/objective-c-developers/primer https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/xamarin/ios/get-started/ob... Javascript https://www.npmjs.com/package/objc https://www.npmjs.com/package/objc
eschaton 3y ago
What’s hostile about trying to provide the best possible APIs for a platform according to the vision of the people creating those APIs?

Klonoar 3y ago

I mean, hang on there... Objective-C, while probably frustrating to get started with, is literally "just about C". Projects have been doing Objective-C interop for decades now, very similar to what is being done in the posted article. It's not really gated off at a programming layer, moreso in how Apple's been so frustrating about developing on non-Apple hardware. It's not exactly what I would call "hostile", language-wise. Swift, on the other hand, might be a bigger barrier...

jwells89 3y ago
Yeah, bindings for UIKit aren’t actually all that challenging to write. There’s quite a number of UIKit apps written at least partially in languages other than Obj-C/Swift. Android Framework on the other hand is not great in this department. Practically speaking it’s just Java and Kotlin. I wish I could write Swift there because even if Kotlin is similar syntactically the JVM baggage can be irritating.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

wk_end 3y ago

Complaining about the JVM on Android ("a low powered platform") feels like a take that's about 10-15 years out of date. A modern Android phone is several orders of magnitude more powerful, however you might want to measure that, than the machines that Java was first designed for. And anyway, Android doesn't really use a VM anymore - it's been AOT compiling apps on installation for around a decade. There's about a billion things about developing on Android that are absolutely miserable. HLL-induced perf bottlenecks aren't usually one of them.

phendrenad2 3y ago
I don't think GP's complaint is about Java and Swift being unperformant, I think the complaint is that you can't use the language of your choice easily. If we just had a C API we could interpret Ruby or Python with a standard interpreter. But instead, if you want to write a Ruby or Python mobile app, you need to translate objects between the language of your choice and Java/ObjC.
- iainmerrick 3y ago
  Right -- Android does have a C API but it’s a pain to use and really incomplete: https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/stable_apis https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/stable_apis If you want to do anything else you need JNI which is an even bigger pain. I don’t really understand why the Android team haven’t made it easy to call any Java API from C, with auto-generated bindings or some such. I think they just don’t believe in apps using native code, beyond the special case of games (note that pretty much all the native APIs are to do with low-level graphics and sound).
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    You don't need to wonder, it is quite explicity mentioned on the NDK documentation. "The Android NDK is a toolset that lets you implement parts of your app in native code, using languages such as C and C++. For certain types of apps, this can help you reuse code libraries written in those languages." -- https://developer.android.com/ndk https://developer.android.com/ndk "The NDK may not be appropriate for most novice Android programmers who need to use only Java code and framework APIs to develop their apps. However, the NDK can be useful for cases in which you need to do one or more of the following: - Squeeze extra performance out of a device to achieve low latency or run computationally intensive applications, such as games or physics simulations. - Reuse your own or other developers' C or C++ libraries. " -- https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides There is also the security aspect, why they discourage the use of those languages for full blown applications.
    - 3y ago

steve1977 3y ago

Objective-C and Swift are used all over the Apple platforms, including desktop macOS. So „barely used“ on other platforms is not really true. Also considering the number of iOS devices, those two languages are probably more usable in practice than for example C#, even if the latter is cross-platform.

dreamcompiler 3y ago
"barely used on other platforms" clearly meant (to me anyway) barely used on non-Apple platforms. They're not terrible languages, but they're pretty uncommon outside the Apple ecosystem.
- steve1977 3y ago
  But the Apple ecosystem is huge. It’s just much more consumer-oriented, in contrast to „corporate“ languages like Java and C#.

rectang 3y ago

The interests of platform vendors and application developers are not aligned. Platform vendors seek to lock in developers and discourage development on competing platforms, while developers wish to leverage their skills portably across multiple platforms.

sdflhasjd 3y ago
Google do maintain Flutter though, which is effectively a competitor.
astrange 3y ago
Google isn't capable of aligning itself with its own mission, let alone locking in developers. They'll sooner release 10 programming platforms invented for 10 new messaging apps.

cellularmitosis 3y ago

This isn’t so crazy. Apple doesn’t want developers creating a bunch of slow, bloated, interpreted apps.

akmarinov 3y ago
They really don’t care. Source: every airline app ever, every Cordova or most RN apps As long as they tie into bringing Apple money- it’s fair game

pjmlp 3y ago

Not kept up with the times? Since Android 5, with ART introduction, that Android uses a mix of AOT/JIT code. Java was invented for low end IoT, there isn't anything more low powered than anything in the last 20 years of mobile computing. Apple and Google should be cherished by not keeping the old C and C++ song of POSIX tunes going. As Rob Pike puts it, it is like only listening to David Cassidy records.

no_wizard 3y ago

Given that Swift is open source, I'm surprised Android hasn't made it a 1st party alternative to using Kotlin. They could capture alot more developers this way, as learning 1 language for both mobile platforms would facilitate more iOS only apps (there are many still even today) to get ported to Android. This may finally make Android tablets viable, as the app ecosystem for tablets isn't as good as iPadOS

pjmlp 3y ago
Android has 70% of the world market, there is no reason to care about Swift. Also Kotlin and Android Studio are mostly developed by JetBrains that is in bed with Google for Android tooling, if anything I expect more Google acquiring JetBrains than supporting Swift on Android.
cxr 3y ago
Objective-C has been open source for even longer, and Cocoa and the associated mobile toolkits eminently clonable. I'm rather more surprised that Google didn't make an 80/20 iOS compatibility toolkit 15 years ago. If they didn't do that then when iOS was dominating the hearts and minds of pretty much every developer behind any noteworthy mobile app, then I wouldn't expect them to make Swift a first-class priority today, when Android has basically "won" on the global scale.

dagmx 3y ago

It's really trivial to use ObjC from any language with a CFFI. and in turn really trivial to expose Swift to ObjC as well, so to other languages. Just some examples of bindings: Python https://pypi.org/project/pyobjc/ https://pypi.org/project/pyobjc/ Rust https://docs.rs/objc/latest/objc/ https://docs.rs/objc/latest/objc/ C# https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/xamarin/ios/get-started/objective-c-developers/primer https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/xamarin/ios/get-started/ob... Javascript https://www.npmjs.com/package/objc https://www.npmjs.com/package/objc

eschaton 3y ago

What’s hostile about trying to provide the best possible APIs for a platform according to the vision of the people creating those APIs?