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> Is an application supposed to be able to run on arbitrarily low memory? Of course. Experience is everything on iPhones (and should be on most devices). If an

by hboon 18y ago

> Is an application supposed to be able to run on arbitrarily low memory? Of course. Experience is everything on iPhones (and should be on most devices). If an app crashes, it's bad.

Tichy 18y ago
But it doesn't seem to be doable. As the original poster said,you can hardly unload a level in a game if there is insufficient memory. Sorry, but that requirement seems silly to me.
- hboon 18y ago
  You are right, it doesn't seem to be doable. And that's the point, which is why the author is complaining/writing about it. Why is a requirement for games not to crash silly? Or do you think apps cannot crash but games can?
  - Tichy 18y ago
    It just seems reasonable that an application has a minimum memory requirement. Is it really so bad on the iPhone that memory can be arbitrarily low? What if the iPhone never gives my app more than 1KB memory? I just see no way to make it run reasonably with 1KB. Also a crash is different from exiting with an error (although still annoying from the user's perspective).
    - hboon 18y ago
      Oh, I see you mean exiting gracefully with an error instead of crashing. That's different, my bad. But not so different though, because telling a user your game/app can't run anymore because <insert pleasant looking reason here> doesn't help and the user can hardly do anything to help give the app a higher chance to run. Of course they can start Safari, close all the tabs etc, but it is (1) tedious and (2) many users wouldn't know how to do it (3) again destroys the experience. Also, try to catch the error may not work in practice. It will work sometimes, but there's really no guarantee how much time you have to save the current state, and show a nice error because the app is shutdown. The irony is that the environment uses reference counting to allow better control of memory yet there is this limitation. Or maybe it had to use reference counting because of this limitation. Still it's a pretty nice platform to code for, it's just us developers asking for more :)

by hboon 18y ago

> Is an application supposed to be able to run on arbitrarily low memory? Of course. Experience is everything on iPhones (and should be on most devices). If an app crashes, it's bad.

Tichy 18y ago

But it doesn't seem to be doable. As the original poster said,you can hardly unload a level in a game if there is insufficient memory. Sorry, but that requirement seems silly to me.

hboon 18y ago
You are right, it doesn't seem to be doable. And that's the point, which is why the author is complaining/writing about it. Why is a requirement for games not to crash silly? Or do you think apps cannot crash but games can?
- Tichy 18y ago
  It just seems reasonable that an application has a minimum memory requirement. Is it really so bad on the iPhone that memory can be arbitrarily low? What if the iPhone never gives my app more than 1KB memory? I just see no way to make it run reasonably with 1KB. Also a crash is different from exiting with an error (although still annoying from the user's perspective).
  - hboon 18y ago
    Oh, I see you mean exiting gracefully with an error instead of crashing. That's different, my bad. But not so different though, because telling a user your game/app can't run anymore because <insert pleasant looking reason here> doesn't help and the user can hardly do anything to help give the app a higher chance to run. Of course they can start Safari, close all the tabs etc, but it is (1) tedious and (2) many users wouldn't know how to do it (3) again destroys the experience. Also, try to catch the error may not work in practice. It will work sometimes, but there's really no guarantee how much time you have to save the current state, and show a nice error because the app is shutdown. The irony is that the environment uses reference counting to allow better control of memory yet there is this limitation. Or maybe it had to use reference counting because of this limitation. Still it's a pretty nice platform to code for, it's just us developers asking for more :)