Re:Native UIKit iPhone Apps Written In Lua
by tumult on Thursday October 01, 2009 @03:35AM
(#854500)
Yes, I actually agree with you. Especially iPhone is a little ways off from being suitable for a scripting language.
Re:Native UIKit iPhone Apps Written In Lua
by davidw on Thursday October 01, 2009 @04:22AM
(#854536)
No it isn't. As I said below, Hecl works fine on phones much slower than the iPhone. Ok, you don't want to do a big, huge complex app in a dynamic language, but they would be just fine for quick one-offs. Just like with regular computers...
Re:Native UIKit iPhone Apps Written In Lua
by tumult on Thursday October 01, 2009 @04:56AM
(#854558)
Yeah, but that's not very interesting, so I don't include it :)
You can do big complex apps in dynamic languages though. But iPhone is a somewhat restricted environment (not THAT restricted, really) where you are encouraged to use as small a footprint as reasonably possible.
Re:Native UIKit iPhone Apps Written In Lua
by davidw on Thursday October 01, 2009 @06:40AM
(#854672)
> Yeah, but that's not very interesting, so I don't include it :)
Stuff like PHP indicates that plenty of people are quite happy to do quick one off's. Or Tcl/Tk for Unix, or VB for Windows. Scripting is a very sensible idea, and phones are quite capable of handling it these days.
I think it's extremely interesting creating something that opens up development to more people.
Still, I would suggest people who are seriously interested in developing for the iPhone to check if plain Objective-C works for them, first.
My recipe is:
- Objective-C for the minimum necessary to deal with the iPhone specific APIs.
- plain C for critical parts which need to be optimized for speed and memory consumption.
- your favorite embeddable language implementation (mine at the moment is TinyScheme, but I've also used Lua) for scripting.
Also, consider that often you may need to include libraries written in c or c++. This is trivial to do from Objective-C.