Re:The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad
by fpgeek on Tuesday November 22, 2011 @03:09AM
(#3264619)
Android does have IPC mechanisms (Intents and remote methods) that can be used to have another process do work in the background. The difference is that even if you use them, you're still not likely to wind up with something that looks like a set of cooperating command-line utilities.
In any case, I absolutely agree that resource constraints aren't keeping LaTeX off of our mobile devices.
Re:The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad
by nieve on Wednesday November 23, 2011 @03:21AM
(#3269272)
I have TeX Live available in the Ubuntu chroot on my HP TouchPad, so you're right that it's not a resource thing. Admittedly in this case webOS provides a pretty standard Linux environment under the hood, so it falls pretty firmly outside the Android model (much less iOS).
LaTex dates back to the beginning of the 80s. Given that it has the ability to create large documents, I doubt that the required amount of main memory scales linearly with the size of the document.
Also, when you use subprocesses, besides checking their return value, you have some sort of interprocess communication which should detect when one process failed to finish his job.
It looks more like the smartphone runtimes and their sandboxes just don't support it at all, because modern GUI applications rarely build upon multiple executables in the background.