Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad

vallettaventures.tumblr.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 247 posts

Re: The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad

#111

Post by masklinn »

tolmasky wrote: post #85
deadcyclo wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well you obviously weren't careful enough. Nowhere in the article does he talk about a 4 GB binary or binaries. To quote him:"A 4GB Tex distribution dependant on over a 100 binaries" He is talking about the _whole_ distribution not a single or several binaries. So even though you were careful, you still misquoted the article.

"The App Store guidelines insist that any iPad app be a single executable. Jailbreaking would ease this restriction, but in this case Apple’s gatekeepers are right. A 4GB TeX distribution dependant on over 100 binaries is not acceptable on the iPad." From that quote ("A 4GB TeX distribution dependant on over 100 binaries is not acceptable on the iPad."), it is clear that he is musing about a scenario where he ships a…

> As stated many times (and also in that same quote), on the iPhone you are forced to ship something as one executable.

On the other hand, yes the executable must be "one". On the other hand you can download stuff (either directly or via DLC). The issue is that while Apple has relaxed their restrictions on bundling interpreters in applications (you can do that), they have not relaxed their restrictions on downloading interpretable code: it's not allowed. So downloading even styles would be verboten, since styles are TeX, and TeX is executable code.

Re: The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad

#113

Post by super_mario »

gamble wrote: post #2

I was agog when I downloaded the LaTeX binary install for my new Mac a few years ago and discovered how massive it was. LaTeX is almost as big as the entire operating system disk! What on earth is in there?

It also contains almost a gigabyte of documentation (in PDF).

Re: The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad

#114

Post by roel_v »

gjm11 wrote: post #110
roel_v wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's 'bug-free' in the same sense that qmail is bug free: you take a piece of software, design it very carefully to do only the minimum amount required to make it fulfill its purpose, spend a lot of time on making sure there are no 'bugs' under a very strict technocratic definition of 'bugs' (i.e., few features, slow running speed, idiosyncratic workings aren't 'bugs') and then make a career out of marketing yourself…

You think Donald Knuth has made a career for himself out of being able to right 'bug free code'? Really? He's made a career for himself out of being an extremely creative computer scientist and writing outstandingly scholarly books about programming. Far from marketing himself as producing bug-free code, he has published articles entirely devoted to the history of bugs found in his software. (As for the bits that tur…

Of course not, it's hyperbole to illustrate the point. In the specific cases of Qmail and TeX, the 'bug free' aspect of it however is overblown and a marketing gimmick. It's not that hard (given enough time) to make something bug free, it's a whole different thing when the software needs to evolve at the same time to meet the (changing and expanding) requirements of actual users.

Re: The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad

#115

Post by [deleted] »

tolmasky wrote: post #85
deadcyclo wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well you obviously weren't careful enough. Nowhere in the article does he talk about a 4 GB binary or binaries. To quote him:"A 4GB Tex distribution dependant on over a 100 binaries" He is talking about the _whole_ distribution not a single or several binaries. So even though you were careful, you still misquoted the article.

"The App Store guidelines insist that any iPad app be a single executable. Jailbreaking would ease this restriction, but in this case Apple’s gatekeepers are right. A 4GB TeX distribution dependant on over 100 binaries is not acceptable on the iPad." From that quote ("A 4GB TeX distribution dependant on over 100 binaries is not acceptable on the iPad."), it is clear that he is musing about a scenario where he ships a…

[deleted]

Re: The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad

#117

Post by zerostar07 »

atakan_gurkan wrote: post #10

The price of a LaTeX rewrite would be even higher: incompatibility. If one tries to rewrite TeX, the problem gets much much worse, since TeX is, for all intents and purposes, bug-free. A new implementation will certainly not be. Joel Spolsky said it very well http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html I disagree that the current situation is LaTeX developers' fault. TeX and LaTeX are complex pieces of…

The only think i 'd keep from old tex is part of the mathematical notation. Otherwise, it's bloated, quirky and doesn't handle international text well.

Re: The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad

#118

Post by deadcyclo »

tolmasky wrote: post #85
deadcyclo wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well you obviously weren't careful enough. Nowhere in the article does he talk about a 4 GB binary or binaries. To quote him:"A 4GB Tex distribution dependant on over a 100 binaries" He is talking about the _whole_ distribution not a single or several binaries. So even though you were careful, you still misquoted the article.

"The App Store guidelines insist that any iPad app be a single executable. Jailbreaking would ease this restriction, but in this case Apple’s gatekeepers are right. A 4GB TeX distribution dependant on over 100 binaries is not acceptable on the iPad." From that quote ("A 4GB TeX distribution dependant on over 100 binaries is not acceptable on the iPad."), it is clear that he is musing about a scenario where he ships a…

I think you are missing the point. The apple guidelines do not state that a program can only consist of an executable. That would not make any sense. Rather they state that any application can only consist of a single executable in addition to whatever resource files are included. In the case of the Latex distribution in question one would have to convert all 100 executables into one executable, my guess would be perhaps 100 megabytes. In addition one would have to include lots of resource files, mainly sty-files bringing the whole bundle of an executable + resource files up to 4GB.

AFAIK Apple doesn't restrict you from bundling files in your application. That simply wouldn't make any sense.

The point here is that he is talking about an application consisting of a single runnable binary of size X with tons of bundled .sty-files that brings the whole application up to 4GB.

Previously, this would not be allowed, since .sty-files are interpreted (which in turn would make it impossible to implement LaTeX on the iPhone), but that really wasn't the point here. The point is simply that this wouldn't be a single 4GB executable, but a an executable of perhaps 100MB bundled with a whole bunch of .sty (and other) files to a total size of 4 GB.

Edit: Fixed typos. Sorry. HN doesn't work very well on my phone.

Re: The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad

#119

Post by anghyflawn »

gizzlon wrote: post #108
anghyflawn wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Um, for about any other reason that you would want to use document editing software on a tablet? For instance, I use LibreOffice and its ilk only for the most throwaway documents (and open others' files). Having an iPad means I don't need to lug my laptop around to work on my thesis (I run Emacs on a VPS via SSH to do it, and while personally I don't particularly care about the aesthetics, I'd say the use case is cer…

So, do you also lug around a keyboard for the ipad? Or do you actually type using the touchscreen? Maybe you just need a smaller laptop .. Also, terminals are great, but writing anything serious without X is a pain.

I use a ZaggMate which doubles as protection, weighs about the same as any other case and is not bulky at all. It works quite well.

> Maybe you just need a smaller laptop ..

No, I don't want to have a small laptop as my main computer. I had an Eee before the iPad, but the difference in the writing experience is not too different in the end and the other advantages of the iPad are greater. In any case, you can hardly call me a person who unreasonably hangs on to Apple stuff: I'm writing this under Linux which I installed on the MBP my university gave me. I hardly ever boot into OS X here.

> Also, terminals are great, but writing anything serious without X is a pain.

Why? Emacs doesn't really need X, and I don't need to re-typeset my work every five minutes.

Re: The price of a messy codebase: No LaTeX on the iPad

#120

Post by iqster »

shaggyfrog wrote: post #79
Tomis wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could use a virtual machine library (if anything suitable exists) and run everything inside one executable - it would probably have horrid performance but you get rid of the single binary restriction. You can put on a nice front-end and tell the user how much longer he has to wait until the operation is complete.

Virtual machines are generally prohibited by the guidelines as well. (Exceptions exist for things like script interpreters, which need to be present for some games to run, e.g. Lua.)

I never understood the exception for game engines (ala Lua). Why are those okay but other VMs not okay (from Apple's perspective, of course)?
Post reply on HN