The strange case of virtual machines on telephones

Re:The strange case of virtual machines on telephones by CountHackulus on Thursday August 26, 2010 @05:25PM (#1637209)

If you've ever written cross-platform code, especially between little and big endian machines, or even worse, different 64-bit implementations, then you know that compilers can't even come close to solving everything for you.

Cross platform code needs lots of thought and hard work. THAT is why VM languages are nice.

As for JITs, yes, they're getting much faster and much better at recognizing code to optimize. Then again, so are static compilers. But both of these technologies are slowly merging together. JITs are getting ahead of time compilation, and static compilers are getting profile directed compilations.

You just have to ask yourself, is a 40% boost in performance worth hours, possibly weeks, of rewriting code for a different platform?

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Re:The strange case of virtual machines on telephones by pkaler on Thursday August 26, 2010 @09:56PM (#1637794)

You don't need a VM to solve endian issues. This can be handled at the framework or library level. For example, the NSCoder class handles most of this for you in the OSX/iOS world. Conform to the NSCoding protocol and endian issues during serialization are handled for you.

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Re:The strange case of virtual machines on telephones by vetinari on Friday August 27, 2010 @07:26AM (#1638494)

Many apps and libraries are ported, not written from scratch. You may not have an option to "conform to the NSCoding protocol", because you already have existing code, written before Apple Era.

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