News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Poll: A year from now, which language will you be writing mobile apps in?. Parent comment

Re:Poll: A year from now, which language will you be writing... by iloveponies on Thursday December 09, 2010 @07:59PM (#1990069)
I disagree. Native apps will not have to, unless they specifically introduce it, the overheads of a browser rendering engine and all that entails. Even after you make the rendering engine as efficient as possible both in software and in hardware engineering, the overheads will always be there no matter how good you get things. You really can only do so much on 3.7v.

Personally, I'm looking into doing Qt development next year.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Poll: A year from now, which language will you be writing... by frankus on Thursday December 09, 2010 @08:21PM (#1990145)
At the risk of making this a "me too" comment, I want to expand on iloveponies answer.

Mobile is special, in that the answer to the question of "would less processor/memory/storage overhead be better?" is probably going to be "yes" for the foreseeable future. It certainly will for the next year.

This gives you a very different tradeoff between developer productivity and code efficiency than you would have on a desktop machine, much less in a server farm.

At some point batteries will be so good, and processors so efficient, and memory so cheap that the overhead of not running natively will go from "it doesn't matter except for some games and stuff" to "it doesn't matter". And compilers and development environments will be able to amp up developer productivity without sacrificing power efficiency. So daleharvey might get the last laugh. Just not next year.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Poll: A year from now, which language will you be writing... by daleharvey on Thursday December 09, 2010 @08:13PM (#1990118)
I think any time you are saying X maybe ore convenient but it wont be as computationally efficient it becomes a matter of "when" not a matter of "if"

That being said I already spend the majority of my time using mobile optimised web sites / web apps and they havent had a noticeable effect on my battery vs native apps, so while I am making it a "prediction", its really already happened, I just think the trend will continue.

[ Parent | on HN ]