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Google’s not-so-secret new OS

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Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#351

Post by taneq »

michaelmrose wrote: post #256
taneq wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you somehow haven't noticed that even mobile devices now are an order of magnitude faster than desktop computers were back in the days of applets. Desktop computers can run Java applications with no significant overhead.

This outlook is why lots of people have to go to work and deal with absurdly slow trash software written to run on absurdly fast hardware.

No. I'm not saying terribly designed, lazily coded enterprise apps are ok, I'm saying if Java can be fast on a $200 mobile phone, it can be fast on a desktop.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#352

Post by Asooka »

bashtoni wrote: post #259
bitL wrote: post #247

Seems like Free Software that propelled early Internet pioneers served its purpose and those companies are turning their backs on it - first with Apple, GCC->LLVM, now with Google, Linux->Fuchsia :( I am getting afraid of another dark age on the horizon... I guess it's going to be inevitable as 90% of SW developers will find themselves redundant when inferring AI capable of composing code blocks and listening to/read…

I think Google is probably the most Free Software friendly of the the new big three (Amazon, Google, Microsoft). They haven't disappointed with Fuschia which appears to be entirely copyleft: https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/magenta/+/master/LICENSE https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/fonts/+/master/LICENSE

That's BSD-license though, which doesn't force companies to respect your freedoms. Parent was talking exactly about GPL being dropped in favour of licenses that allow vendor lock-in. It means a philosophical departure from user-first towards corporation-first and the Free Software world the FSF envisioned getting trampled.

The zeitgeist is moving towards conservatism in general, so it doesn't surprise me, but it's still sad.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#353

Post by throwawaydbfif »

innocentoldguy wrote: post #309
throwawaydbfif wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you that JavaScript sucks balls in far more ways than is reasonable for such a widely used language. The design is seriously shit when compared directly to really any popular language, even PHP. I disagree with transpilers not being a reasonable answer. Eventually JavaScript will be okay to work with, some day. Until then, transpilers offer nearly unlimited freedom in redesigning the bad parts of the lan…

I can see your point about transpilers. Of all the transpilers I've used, I like Elm the best, due to its functional nature, syntax, strong typing, compiler, and debugger. It isn't fully stable yet, as a language, and there have been breaking changes in each release since I started using it, but it offers the most promising departure from JavaScript. I guess anything that facilitates the de-turding of web development…

Haha de-turding is a great way to put it. I just don't think a new language is a reasonable option. There's what maybe... 50,000 different versions of the ~500 web browsers from different eras still running out there somewhere?

If having code work almost everywhere is important for a project, that project will be using vanilla ES3-5 JavaScript for the next 10+ years. Maybe not the latest startups but all sorts of enterprisey ancient stuff that needs to run needs some path forward. If typescript can provide that it will become the lowest common denominator at any company that ships both new and legacy codebases.

Typescript to JS transpilation is extremely similar to the strategy that produced C++ from C. We know it will work, and it's been done before to great success. C++ isn't perfect but I think everyone agrees it's definitely a lot nicer to work with than C, and that's exactly how I describe Typescript as well

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#354

Post by xg15 »

mark242 wrote: post #87
MarkMc wrote: post #74

It bothers me that Google does not seem particularly interested in doing the one thing that would make their Android platform absolutely dominant: Allow Chrome to run Android apps on Mac and Windows. Google has already done 90% of the necessary work by adding Android apps to ChromeOS. Two and a half years ago it created "App Runtime for Chrome" which demonstrated that Android apps could run on Windows and Mac in a li…

Sun tried that, back in the day. Maybe you heard about Java applets, maybe you didn't. They were the slowest thing about the web, insecure even with a sandbox, and just an overall pain. Short of having a jvm always running on your machine, the performance of Android-via-Chrome will completely turn people off the Android ecosystem.

> ... Short of having a jvm always running on your machine ...

This is basically how Dalvik/Zygote worked on actual Android. From what I know, Chrome too uses always-running background processes even if you don't have a browser window open (for mainentance work and to improve startup times).

So I'd assume the project would do exactly that.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#355

Post by isoos »

throwawaydbfif wrote: post #343
isoos wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your worries about being locked in may have been valid 2-3 years ago (1), but things have changed a lot since: Dart has an ongoing project (Dart Developer Compiler) which has a goal, among others, to produce readable, idiomatic EcmaScript 6. That is as close to your TypeScript fallback as it can get. (2) Somebody also demonstrated Dart to LLVM compilation is possible. The language has a decent library for parsing the…

I didn't know of the developer compiler, when that reaches production I won't have any real citicism of Dart. For now Js fallback is the only realistic option for running code on the web. Even if we get native typescript or dart support tomorrow we will still need to put up with JavaScript for like 7-10 years. For this reason a readable JS fallback seems like a vital feature to me at least. It's depressing but realit…

Yes, Dart has similar constructs (kernel for low-level parts, and AST and analyzer for high-level parts).

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#356

Post by dao- »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #326
dx034 wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They say that for every new Gorilla glass. It'll always be super resistant against anything. Yet, the newest iPhones still scratch if you just have them in the same pocket as your keys for more than a day (personal experience). And it's still very easy to destroy the screen if the phone drops once (even though less of the screen will crack nowadays). We are very far away from phones that you could use without screen…

Scratches are one thing; you can work around them with disposable screen protectors. But we're talking about a device that's constantly carried around and used (I probably have my phone on me more often than my wallet). Gorilla glass or not, it falls from a meter onto a hard surface, and you have a screen to replace. You accidentally sit on it, and you may have a screen to replace. And given the prices of replacement…

> Gorilla glass or not, it falls from a meter onto a hard surface, and you have a screen to replace.

I dropped my Xperia Z1 Compact a bunch of times from that height, the screen is still fine...

> You accidentally sit on it, and you may have a screen to replace.

Solution: Don't ever put your phone in your back pocket.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#357

Post by flukus »

pjmlp wrote: post #339
TeMPOraL wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bump it to 3-4 years then. Bloated manufacturer updates combine with bloat in most popular applications and the regular web bloat to make the phone unusably slow after few years. Between that and fragility of smartphones (mechanical damage, water damage), most people are bound to replace theirs every few years anyway.

> Bump it to 3-4 years then. Bloated manufacturer updates combine with bloat in most popular applications and the regular web bloat to make the phone unusably slow after few years. My S3 is 4 years old now, and it is works perfectly fine. When it dies, I will most likely adopt one of my Lumia devices as main one, or will buy a 2nd hand Android device, instead of giving money to support bad OEMs

> My S3 is 4 years old now, and it is works perfectly fine.

Is it still getting security patches? If not then it's not running perfectly fine.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#358

Post by JumpCrisscross »

dTal wrote: post #349
pjc50 wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's one design decision in Linux that makes this slightly harder than it needs to be in this situation: Linux's lack of a driver ABI. At the moment, phones include all sorts of custom drivers for very specific versions of the hardware. The OEMs ought to send these upstream, but don't want to. You can't build your own kernel and upgrade without breaking all the binary-only drivers. Android falls between two stools…

>The OEMs ought to send these upstream, but don't want to. Isn't this a rampant GPL violation? Why do we put up with this? We are about to lose the war for general purpose computing due to insufficient GPL enforcement.

> Why do we put up with this?

Who is "we"? As in, who will pay the lawyers?

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#359

Post by [deleted] »

dTal wrote: post #349
pjc50 wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's one design decision in Linux that makes this slightly harder than it needs to be in this situation: Linux's lack of a driver ABI. At the moment, phones include all sorts of custom drivers for very specific versions of the hardware. The OEMs ought to send these upstream, but don't want to. You can't build your own kernel and upgrade without breaking all the binary-only drivers. Android falls between two stools…

>The OEMs ought to send these upstream, but don't want to. Isn't this a rampant GPL violation? Why do we put up with this? We are about to lose the war for general purpose computing due to insufficient GPL enforcement.

[deleted]

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#360

Post by throwawaydbfif »

isoos wrote: post #348
logicchains wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think it is way ahead of the JS/TS stack in many regards. In what ways do you consider it ahead of Typescript? Personally as someone who's particularly fond of static type systems (Haskell and the like), Typescript's type system seems way more advanced and powerful than Dart's (union and intersection types, in particular, and non-nullable types). Map types (introduced in Typescript 2.1) also seem pretty interestin…

Some of my earlier notes are in this thread (it is more about the day-to-day feature I actually use and like, and less about the fine details of the type system) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13371009 Personally I don't get the hype around union types: at the point where you need to check which type you are working with, you may as well use a generic object (and maybe an assert if you are pedantic). Intersecti…

I agree about union types. They can quickly result in insane variable declaration statements that are hard to understand.

I dislike nulls though, I always wish people would just use a flag or error handling when objects are undefined, instead of "hey this object is the flag and sometimes it's not actually an object!"

You'd think language designers would learn after dealing with null pointers :)

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