Can I open a game on iOS and let it play? Say I want to idle in Clicker Heroes while I browse the net.

Can it do that? Without jail-breaking it?

Or play YouTube without having the app open.

It's literally not a general purpose computer, you can't compile and execute code on it. DOS at least came with an assembler-debugger and a linker.

How many of iPad users even know what "compile" means? Why not forget that world does not spin around developers once in a while?

Because its called the iPad Pro?

And the only Pro users are going to be developers/programmers, right?

How about my doctor while he visits patients, or my dentist to show me my X-rays easily, or the automative tech that plugs in an OBDII module and instantly sees information on the large screen...

Those people are professionals, and that is what this is geared towards, not just developers.

It'd be nice if they remembered us. We seem to be the only creative types not being targeted here. And yes, I'd actually consider it for a few purposes..

No, don't ship the SDK by default. Make it so that it only runs locally-compiled binaries. That's okay. But I'd like the ability to use this for real work that I do. Everybody else gets to work on it, after all.

> the ability to use this for [programming]

Install Parallels Access on your iPad Pro and your desktop compile engine (iMac? Mac Pro? Mac Mini? MacBook?).

Actually I don't think the iPad Pro (or any iOS device) is geared towards programmers.

You can use XCode on any Mac and compile and upload apps to your iPad just fine. No need for a $99 developer account anymore too.

There are plenty of programming apps in the app store too if you just want like a Python, Javascript, etc. shell to mess around in too.

but you can't compile code on the device itself which is kind of a big deal

What version of DOS was this? I seem to remember MASM being a rather expensive piece of software which didn't ship with DOS.

It came with DEBUG for an assembler. I can't back up the linker statement.

This is flatly false. There are numerous programming environments available on iOS, and it has the JavaScript environment with the most advanced available JIT built in.

Wrong. https://www.bignerdranch.com/blog/javascriptcore-example/ JavaScriptCore is what Apple uses for built in JS evaluation, and V8 can't be implemented due to lack of execution of code from user-writable memory. JSC most definitely does not have the "most advanced available JIT."

Depends on the benchmark. It's certainly competitive. For example:

http://arewefastyet.com/#machine=29

Right, it's competitive... But being competitive and "most advanced", to me, are two different things. Not knocking Safari's performance, the battery life you get from it kicks butt. Still, different.

(Also, wow. Comex replied to me. Very cool.)

I mean, there's definitely a good argument that V8 is most advanced, but, for example, JSC is the only one that has the LLVM 'fourth tier', and it shows on asm.js benchmarks, where it mostly beats V8 (loses to Firefox, but that has asm.js-specific code while the others don't):

http://arewefastyet.com/#machine=29&view=breakdown&suite=asm...

So I think the question of "most advanced" is basically subjective.

Don't get me wrong! I would strongly prefer if iOS allowed any JIT to be used. I just think calling the one that can be used "most advanced" is not wrong per se.

Well said. Thanks for the insight.