Re:Going under the hood of Inbox
by nostrademons on Friday November 21, 2014 @04:13AM
(#8640467)
The Apps (+ Ads, Android, Social, & DevTools) side of Google is a Java-oriented company. Search, Geo, Infrastructure, and Chrome are all very much C++-oriented. (Inbox is very much an Apps project, so of course they would lean toward a Java stack.)
Re:Going under the hood of Inbox
by cromwellian on Friday November 21, 2014 @05:56AM
(#8640724)
That's true, Google has very large codebases of C++, Java, and Javascript. But the C++ code base cross-compiled to JS via emscripten wouldn't help us much on Inbox since most of the interesting bits are very backend oriented.
Simple fact is, Google is a Java oriented company. Inbox uses lots of components and shared code across the company that are based on Java. To use C# or C++ to do it would rewriting a lot of code that already exists.
JS performance is not the gating factor for the Web client in most cases, it's rendering and startup (code size). We run expensive calculations off the main thread in a Web Worker anyway.
The translation of Java to Objective-C could have been to C++ as well. I started prototyping something a while ago that does such. Objective-C makes more sense, because for iOS, the front end developers get to consume 'idiomatic' code that looks like they had hand-written it and it meshes well with other tools, and would work with Swift too.