Re:The web apps that will eat mobile
by oblio on Tuesday June 05, 2018 @10:40AM
(#17238043)
There is such a thing as "good enough". The cheap plastic solution tends to win when that happens. We weren't there in 2011, maybe we're not there in 2018, but the writing's on the wall.
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When that happens, the browser would have turned into a general purpose VM running apps via WebAssembly with WebGL/WebGPU for rendering, thus becoming native as well.
The writing is on the wall with the ongoing efforts on .NET, Java, Go, Unity, Unreal and who knows, someone might even port Flash to it.
I don't consider an universal bytecode as native.
So according to you IBM and Unisys mainframes, the Xerox PARC computers, watchOS apps don't run native code.
Do the CPUs of their respective systems directly understand the instructions? In my opinion, if they don't, that's not native code. Of course, for strategic reasons such as portability the manufacturer might not provide any kind of access. At which point that's the closest to "native" you're going to get...
Depends, on the mainframes and watchOS, bytecode (or bitcode) is used as portable binary format and JIT compiled at installation time into native code.
On Xerox PARC systems, the CPUs were micro-coded.