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Google’s not-so-secret new OS

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Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#521

Post by munificent »

jerf wrote: post #455
mncharity wrote: post #68

> I don’t see the average garbage-collected language using a virtual machine allowing for a target higher than 60fps realistically. But... " average garbage-collected language using a virtual machine" doesn't describe any of C/C++, Dart, Go, Java, Python, or Rust. Nor Javascript. I get greater than 60 fps with my existing Vive three.js WebVR-ish electron/chromium linux stack. Even on an old laptop with integrated gra…

Some people seem to have skimmed over the discussions about the pros and cons of garbage collection and come away with the idea that all garbage collected languages function by stopping the world for 50-100 millisecond pauses four or five times per second, minimum. There are real performance issues that GC can create, but there's a looooooot of vigorous overstating of the issues. Slightly in those people's defense, i…

One way to look at it is:

In a manually managed language, the performance of the application's memory management code is limited by the skill of the application developer. In a managed language, it's limited by the skill of the GC developer.

GCs have gotten a lot better in the past twenty years, in large part because they have the luxury of amortizing their work across a million applications. That makes it financially viable to throw a ton of person-years at your GC. That's not the case for the malloc()s and free()s in a single application.

So just through economies of scale, we should expect to see, and indeed have seen, managed languages catch up the the memory performance of the average manually managed app.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#522

Post by munificent »

saghm wrote: post #171
mncharity wrote: post #68

> I don’t see the average garbage-collected language using a virtual machine allowing for a target higher than 60fps realistically. But... " average garbage-collected language using a virtual machine" doesn't describe any of C/C++, Dart, Go, Java, Python, or Rust. Nor Javascript. I get greater than 60 fps with my existing Vive three.js WebVR-ish electron/chromium linux stack. Even on an old laptop with integrated gra…

> But... "average garbage-collected language using a virtual machine" doesn't describe any of C/C++, Dart, Go, Java, Python, or Rust. I'm curious; what would be an example of something you would describe as an "average garbage collected language using a virtual machine"? Java would certainly be the first language I'd think of for that description.

> I'm curious; what would be an example of something you would describe as an "average garbage collected language using a virtual machine"?

Ruby 1.8, Lua, or CPython.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#523

Post by munificent »

Nypro wrote: post #459

So Google is going with a DartVM on this one. Dart is cool and all, but why DartVM? It's the same restrictive model we have with Android (dalvikVM) where you can only develop with languages that can compile down to Java bytecode. In this case, however, we will be using languages that can transpile to Dart source instead! Why not JavaScript engine? With the current movement with WebAssembly, I see a lot potential use…

> Why not JavaScript engine?

Having your bottom level language semantics be dynamically typed seems to place a real cap on application performance. Given that the underlying machine code is typed, I don't think it makes sense for the lowest level language you can target to be dynamically typed.

(WebAssembly is basically an acknowledgement of that fact.)

> The biggest point being the ability to code in any language that compiles to wasm.

Conversely, I don't think WASM is a great target language either. It doesn't include GC, and I don't think it makes sense for each application to have to ship its own GC and runtime. WASM is a good target for C/C++, but not for higher level languages like Java/C#/JS/Python/Ruby/Dart.

They say they intend to support GC, but they've been saying that for a while and I haven't seen much motion yet. I don't think Fuchsia can afford to wait around for that.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#524

Post by josefx »

dfox wrote: post #481
josefx wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So were Java Applets with AWT. Users hated that, so Sun tried PLAF Uh, Java AWT was the native toolkit. Swing was the non native UI with the ugly METAL default Look and Feel. There are some nice custom Look and Feel implementations that don't try to emulate a platform, I think Matlab uses one for its UI.

And the Metal plaf was the least ugly of the three that were originally shipped with JVM (other two tried to match how AWT would look on Windows and Unix). But IIRC, AWT was not native (in the sense of "calls native OS GUI components") but only tried to look native and failed horribly at achieving that. One thing that strikes me as weird is that almost any widget set that does it's own drawing or even just it's own a…

> But IIRC, AWT was not native (in the sense of "calls native OS GUI components") but only tried to look native and failed horribly at achieving that.

A quick check of wikipedia backs my memory, the Java classes were just a thin wrapper around the native components. AWT was mostly bad because it was limited, it does not even have a Table.

> even the basic look because various UI components use wrong size, are placed slightly differently and so on.

The windows API does not come with a layout manager AFAIK. I vagualy remember setting every bit of relevant size/position data by hand last time I used it directly. Same could be done with AWT, so this is mostly likely caused by programmer lazyness.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#525

Post by bitL »

michaelmrose wrote: post #520
bitL wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am currently working on deep learning as well as generating custom programming languages. Maybe you could consider updating yourself? ;-)

Programming touches both comprehension of the code and the world it interacts with. Any program which can write programs based on comprehending natural language ought to be able to rewrite itself. Can you please explain how what you are describing is distinct from AGI?

I view current deep learning as a cumbersome counterpart to retina-level cells (well, from 30,000ft). Anyway, DL can roughly do what a few specialized biological neurons can do, like in the case of retina identifying direction, speed etc. It's far far away even from a whole brain of an insect, but it can do some amazing things already. Here what you can do is to utilize those things it can do (and they will be getting better), and add some human-made inference/anotation/ontology/optimization system on top of these partial components. The human-made system can be chipped away slowly as we figure out how to automate more and more of its functionality.

So for example, for simple programs you don't need to understand what individual code blocks are doing. All you roughly need are some well-defined procedures/visual components (able to ignore unsupported operations) that can be composed LEGO-style. Here AI can learn to associate certain compositions of code blocks with your sentences, e.g. you can teach it with touch what does it mean to resize, move to left, change color etc., and even provide those code blocks. To help it, you have to annotate those code blocks so that you maximize chance of valid outcomes. ML by itself is not capable of inference, so inference must be done differently. Yet what your AI learns with associating certain sentences with outcome in your code blocks will persist. And for making associations you can unleash millions of developers that might be working on your goal unknowingly, e.g. by creating a safe language like Go for which you have derived nice rules that you can plug into your system. Initially you could only to pretty silly things, but the level of its capabilities will be rising all the time and there is a way forward in front of you, even if a bit dimmed.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#526

Post by bitL »

michaelmrose wrote: post #490
bitL wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, for simple apps you can use what we already have in place with some meta-programming rules prepared by humans (currently only a few companies posses this capability though). You can use ML like deep learning variations to learn association between your wishes and corresponding code blocks. Initially apps like that would be simple, i.e. "make a web page", done, "change background color to pink gradient", d…

Drag and drop website building is a monumentally easier challenge and hasn't obsoleted programming.

Sure, but very few regular people have patience even doing D&D websites. Imagine though that you just take your phone, tell it "make a website", then look at it and say, "well, change background to this photo", "hmm, place a gallery from a wedding there", "make a new page linked on the left and call it 'about me'" etc. And you see the changes happening immediately after you say it, and you can even correct it. This is doable today, you just need to have a set of "code blocks" that would allow you to generate proper web app and via engines like phonegap even mobile apps anyone can make.

Imagine you run a small business and need just some simple site with your contacts, and you are able to assemble it with voice in 10 minutes. That would be a complete game changer for most regular people.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#527

Post by bitL »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #397
bitL wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just imagine that you can interactively by voice or by touch tell AI what/how to adjust stuff and it will use it to improve itself for your future similar tasks. Now project there will be 1,000,000 users like that, telling app what exactly did they mean and pointing to proper places in the app. So exactly this will be the conversation you desire, you'd directly tell your app builder what you want, and if it is not do…

>Now project there will be 1,000,000 users like that, telling app what exactly did they mean and pointing to proper places in the app. So exactly this will be the conversation you desire That's not a conversation, that's a statistic. A conversation might start with a user showing me visually how they want something done. Then I may point out why that's not such a good idea and I will be asking why the user wanted it…

Sure, but AI listening to you can be exactly that conversation partner, maybe by utilizing "General's effect" - i.e. just talking about some topic gets you to solution, even if the person next to you have no clue and just listens to you. Here AI can be that person and you can immediately see the result of your talk in a form of changing app you are building, and easily decide something has to be changed. Initially granularity of your changes will be large, i.e. the pre-baked operations will be simple. Later you can get more and more precise, as AI will be developing, and more and more people will be contributing more specialized operations.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#528

Post by remir »

DCKing wrote: post #336
michaelmrose wrote: post #249

It was unfortunately obvious that the writer had insufficient tech chops when use the phrase "a post-API programming model" But pressing on how somehow manages to blame the lack of updates to android phones on the modularity of the Linux kernel. The joke of course being that linux is monolithic and googles new OS is a microkernel ergo more modular. The quote is "...however. I also have to imagine the Android update p…

> Android phones don't get updated because for the manufacturers ensuring their pile of hacks works with a newer version of android would represent a non trivial amount of work for the oem whom already has your money. The only way they can get more of your money is to sell you a new phone which they hope to do between 1-2 years from now. The fact you need Android device OEM's support is precisely the problem here, an…

I absolutely agree. I installed Windows 10 on a old Core Duo clone I bought off Kijiji. Everything worked flawlessly, including its old Nvidia video card. It received the latest updates and security patches directly from Microsoft.

This is what we need with phones.

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#529

Post by wapz »

manmal wrote: post #460
wapz wrote: post #24

I'm a minority I know but I don't like material design because it's terrible at "scaling." It looks great, it's beautiful, but you lose too much damn functionality. When I had to redo apps to material design we had to completely remove multiple buttons due to them not fitting material design standards. I really hope they have some way to alleviate this problem without using 50px icons for all the extra buttons.

Why not bend the rules a bit before omitting vital components?

They weren't vital components but useful for the user. We moved most of the "excess" buttons to the top bar and overflow menu but still had to remove a button here and there completely (we still had the functionality in a different part of the app it was just more tedious to use from our testing).

Re: Google’s not-so-secret new OS

#530

Post by remir »

supremesaboteur wrote: post #27
pier25 wrote: post #9

We definitely need a universal OS for all our devices and I really believe Google is in a great position to get us there. It would really surprise me if Apple got there first. Tim lacks vision and will keep on milking iOS even if the iPad Pro is a failure as a laptop replacement. Windows is still king in the desktop space, at least as far a user base goes, but it's terrible on tablets and phones. MS has all the tech…

Operating System is about applications. Even if Google comes up with a universal OS there will be many applications that only run on Windows forcing people to continue to use it

And this is why we need an open source clone of Windows, which is king of the desktop OS. Beside geeks, the average people doesn't care about operating systems, they care about being able to run their apps.

It's sad that ReactOS doesn't get more support from the community.

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