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Xamarin Open-Sourced

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Re: Xamarin Open-Sourced

#131

Post by osweiller »

nivla wrote: post #45
jeswin wrote: post #31

Honestly, I am a little tired of all the articles (edit: I meant posts) claiming MS is suddenly in the Open Source camp. To truly support Open Source, they should show a willingness to work against Software Patents. The essence of Open Source is the freedom for anyone with a computer to turn their imagination into code. MS remains one of the biggest obstacles in that path. Instead here is what they do: 1) Directly at…

>Honestly, say what you will about Google, but I can't imagine them ever threatening another software company with software patents. That is a naive fanboy outlook towards a company. Its a well known fact that Google bought Motorola only for the patents. Google has also managed to use the patents to sue other companies including Microsoft. Although I still believe it is the game that is flawed and not the players. Go…

"Its a well known fact that Google bought Motorola only for the patents. Google has also managed to use the patents to sue other companies including Microsoft."

Really? Which suits were that?

Google has never sued another company over patents. They've made counterclaims when themselves sued, but claiming otherwise is just a fiction.

And they bought Motorola because Motorola was threatening to start suing all of the other Android makers, causing infighting that Google didn't want. So Google bought Motorola....to stop those patents from being used to sue, further diminishing your point.

On the whole, Google is very much the good guys, and Microsoft are very much the bad guys.

However I will say it is naive to assume this will continue forever. There was a period where Microsoft seldom threatened anyone, and we all held quaint notions about all of their "defensive" patents. Situations and markets change, and suddenly desperation takes foot and the company that was hugs and kisses becomes claws and kicks, so I would never assume that Google will always be a fairly good citizen. It could change.

Re: Xamarin Open-Sourced

#132

Post by mintplant »

ghuntley wrote: post #10

It has been super exciting watching this all unfold over the last year, for those wondering where to get started in the new world of .NET open source - start here: .NET CLR Managed Runtime - https://gitter.im/dotnet/coreclr .NET Framework - https://gitter.im/dotnet/corefx .NET Compiler as a Service ("Roslyn") - https://gitter.im/dotnet/roslyn .NET Orleans Actor Framework - https://gitter.im/dotnet/orleans Mono Framew…

So, what's the story if I want to build a C# application that runs on Windows, OS X, and Linux? Do I use "regular" .NET for Windows and Mono for OS X and Linux? Or will everything eventually be unified into one common platform?

Re: Xamarin Open-Sourced

#133

Post by osweiller »

tacos wrote: post #98
greenspot wrote: post #59

First thought: Xamarin is now open source—great! Second thought: Every time I looked into Xamarin (and I do this every 6 months) there was a lack of killer apps created with Xamarin on both iOS and Android, users' experiences with Xamarin were either rare or negative and in total the community felt non-existent Third thought: Ok got it, they open source to get PR, build a community; I hope that helps and it's not the…

Couple billion dollars in revenue generated with it via Unity alone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_(game_engine) -- and that was a HORRIBLE version of it. Way better now.

What does Unity have to do with Xamarin? Are you referring to the fact that Unity uses an old version of Mono, because that hardly is relevant to greenspot's comment.

To their actual comment, it is extraordinarily difficult to make a quality product with Xamarin. As they said, there are shockingly few wins built with it. There are loads and loads of teams using it, all sure that it's the short cut that will build for everything with one code base, but so few wins.

Re: Xamarin Open-Sourced

#134

Post by ghuntley »

mwcampbell wrote: post #67

Now my only remaining qualm with Xamarin is this: Having two garbage-collected environments interacting within the same program, as is the case with Xamarin on Android, just seems pathologically complex. Does anyone have enough experience with Xamarin on Android to know if this is ever a problem in practice? Edit: I wonder if the Xamarin.Android developers ever considered compiling CIL to JVM bytecode (which would th…

Recommended watching for iOS and Android - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJsmrTQWD2k simple to identify these problems once you know of them. I keep coming across implementations that make some very fatal mistakes about resource management, notably these problems would potentially also happen when not using Xamarin as well (developers not reading documentation/being careful with allocations)

With Android the most common mistake is cross-heap references, putting a large C# array into a java arrayadapter for example will result in objects that live in both worlds which makes it expensive for Java to see the C# object and C# to see the Java object. The objects are effectively being mirrored, the solution is to use C# all the way down. Where the object was created defines ownership, for example ArrayAdapter containing C# objects means owned by Java with overhead for Java to bridge the C# objects.

Re: Xamarin Open-Sourced

#135

Post by tacos »

osweiller wrote: post #133
tacos wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couple billion dollars in revenue generated with it via Unity alone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_(game_engine) -- and that was a HORRIBLE version of it. Way better now.

What does Unity have to do with Xamarin? Are you referring to the fact that Unity uses an old version of Mono, because that hardly is relevant to greenspot's comment. To their actual comment, it is extraordinarily difficult to make a quality product with Xamarin. As they said, there are shockingly few wins built with it. There are loads and loads of teams using it, all sure that it's the short cut that will build for…

People are mixing "Xamarin the company" with "Xamarin technologies" here and I'm not sure how to sort it out. Obviously the tech stack works. Obviously the stack ain't going away, especially now. As for "hard to build a quality product" and "so few wins" well that describes mobile in general now, doesn't it?

Re: Xamarin Open-Sourced

#136

Post by tacos »

apayan wrote: post #121
tacos wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couple billion dollars in revenue generated with it via Unity alone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_(game_engine) -- and that was a HORRIBLE version of it. Way better now.

tl;dr. The success of Unity can't be used as an indicator that cross-platform frameworks are good for productivity/utility apps. Xamarin and Unity don't have anything in common, other than the fact that Unity uses C# for scripting (on an ancient runtime). Cross-platform app development frameworks are generally awful because they don't tightly integrate with the native look and feel of every platform. Video games don'…

I too hate cross-platform schlockware but it sounds like you are not familiar with the technology.

"controls are mapped to platform-specific native user interface elements; for example, a Xamarin.Forms Entry becomes a UITextView on iOS, an EditText on Android, and a TextBox on Windows."

https://www.xamarin.com/forms

Re: Xamarin Open-Sourced

#137

Post by apayan »

tacos wrote: post #136
apayan wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

tl;dr. The success of Unity can't be used as an indicator that cross-platform frameworks are good for productivity/utility apps. Xamarin and Unity don't have anything in common, other than the fact that Unity uses C# for scripting (on an ancient runtime). Cross-platform app development frameworks are generally awful because they don't tightly integrate with the native look and feel of every platform. Video games don'…

I too hate cross-platform schlockware but it sounds like you are not familiar with the technology. "controls are mapped to platform-specific native user interface elements; for example, a Xamarin.Forms Entry becomes a UITextView on iOS, an EditText on Android, and a TextBox on Windows." https://www.xamarin.com/forms

Interesting. I was unaware that Xamarin maps widgets like that. Thanks for enlightening me. :-)

How does it abstract away the more fundamental differences between platforms Activities/Fragments vs. UIViewControllers?

Re: Xamarin Open-Sourced

#138

Post by jestar_jokin »

davb wrote: post #71

I just wish they didn't kill RoboVM. I get the warm and fuzzies when something big is open sourced just like everyone else. Then I snap back to reality and remember that it's ultimately the same organisation that close-sourced RoboVM then killed it, screwing over a lot of people depending on it.

Seriously, RoboVM could have been huge. An ingenious way to introduce app development to your existing hordes of Java devs. Great tech, killed because of business decisions...

Re: Xamarin Open-Sourced

#139

Post by spicyj »

treehau5 wrote: post #88
sremani wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lets agree there are levels of open-ness and not being a Gnu-level or RedHat level OSS does not mean the contributions are not worth it nor should not be acknowledged.

Well I will most certainly agree there is "publicly accessible" source, which is essentially what Microsoft, Facebook, and the likes have, where you can view the code, but getting a pull request accepted requires signing a CLA (with varying levels of avarice) and conforming to the goals of the organization, rather than the project. (Actually I will defend facebook by saying their CLA is not that egregious, and accord…

> the version of react that is open sourced is actually different than the version they use internally

That's not true; we use the same code.

Re: Xamarin Open-Sourced

#140

Post by tacos »

apayan wrote: post #137
tacos wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too hate cross-platform schlockware but it sounds like you are not familiar with the technology. "controls are mapped to platform-specific native user interface elements; for example, a Xamarin.Forms Entry becomes a UITextView on iOS, an EditText on Android, and a TextBox on Windows." https://www.xamarin.com/forms

Interesting. I was unaware that Xamarin maps widgets like that. Thanks for enlightening me. :-) How does it abstract away the more fundamental differences between platforms Activities/Fragments vs. UIViewControllers?

You win some you lose some. With Fragments Xamarin actually extends support to earlier Android devices. Less of an issue now, but there was a time when this actually extended platform reach, reduced code, and simplified training/upgrades.

For some things it's about the common talk-to-the-backend code, not true-code-once across iOS/Android...

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