Re:Show HN: Skip – Build native iOS and Android apps from a ...
by badoongi on Thursday August 29, 2024 @01:38AM
(#41387701)
Nice, this somewhat reminds Apportable: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/apportable
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Re:Show HN: Skip – Build native iOS and Android apps from a ...
by icodestuff on Friday August 30, 2024 @05:03PM
(#41404406)
For sure. Pretty similar problem space, very different implementation and target market. Apportable wasn’t a transpiler (and boy were we proud of that); it was a reimplementation of the iOS frameworks on top of a replacement NDK (Android’s libc was bad-mediocre at the time. Real nasty behaviors in its (dl)malloc for instance). Similar to WINE. It was always targeting games, so there was never a lot of effort to port any of the UIKit controls, but OpenGL CoreGraphics were supported. It also had a compiler extension that let you access the whole Android SDK in ObjC, and a tool for generating ObjC APIs from JARs. The goal was to make ObjC the one true mobile dev language. I applaud the effort to do something similar for Swift, even if it does involve transpilation.