Re:Letter to Steve Jobs
by tjogin on Monday April 12, 2010 @02:31AM
(#1258559)
He never goes into how he uses Lua, but if he's still targeting Apple's libraries (rather than some cross-platform transition layer), they might not even be able to tell he is using Lua in the first place.
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The author of the open letter is behind iPhone Wax: http://github.com/probablycorey/wax
It may also be worth nothing that the particular case of Lua was already prohibited under the iPhone DPLA section 3.3.2 which states that no interpreted code may be included unless it's run by Apple's interpreter(s). Wax embeds a third-party Lua runtime that does just that.
This is stated again and again on HN, but it is just not true. You could run interpreted code, it just wasn't allowed to download and run modules, everything had to be linked into the application.
That was true given early revisions of the agreement. If you revisit the language you'll find that the phrase "download and run" has been replaced with "download or run."
That said, there was talk about moving Wax to llvm-lua such that the resulting application would be compiled machine code. The new clause precludes this option entirely.
The only uncertainty left, now, centers around enforcement. There are a number of PhoneGap and Wax powered apps already in the store, and PhoneGap was even blessed as an approved framework. Only time will tell if that blessing stands.
I'll take a guess - Lua isn't there to abstract the iPhone. It's just there to make development faster. Apple won't clamp down on better apps, they will only target cross-platform abstractions. But it's still a bit worry.