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

Apple deprecates Java

developer.apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 277 posts

Re: Apple deprecates Java

#81

Post by rbanffy »

masklinn wrote: post #78
rbanffy wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Steve hawked it in one of the early OS X keynotes as being the future of the Mac platform That's standard practice. You make it easy to port apps to your platform until you gain traction and until your exclusive technologies do, then make it hard to port away from your platform by phasing out technologies that would enable that. A Java app that runs fine on OSX but that's easy to port to (or directly run on) Window…

> Their move from GCC to clang is no coincidence. Erm... what? Clang has already been ported to Windows (and other platforms). Their move from GCC to clang comes from GCC sucking goat's balls at error reporting and being integrated into an IDE. You might want to note Apple produces an IDE so that's kind-of a big deal for them, and a big reason for the existence of LLVM and related technologies (Clang, LLDB, ...) is v…

Clang/LLVM is BSD while GCC is GPL. That means Apple can extend them all they want without ever giving you, or their competition, any sources.

If they ever perceive a threat from their competition, Clang/LLVM provides a lot more maneuvering space than GCC ever would.

And yes, GCC is a very hard thing to integrate into tools and it's that way by design.

Re: Apple deprecates Java

#83

Post by JeremyBanks »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #31

This could be good news for anyone who uses a Mac to work with Java. There could finally be a JDK for OS X that doesn't lag years behind official Java releases. On the other hand, the margin between Apple not supporting something and Apple banning something is incredibly narrow. Steve Jobs doesn't seem to understand the difference between choice and fragmentation very well.

Banning? I think that seems rather unlikely. To my knowledge Apple's never done anything of the sort on the desktop. On mobile platforms users are more accustomed to having restrictions in place, but if they banned Java on Mac OS the backlash would be immense.

Re: Apple deprecates Java

#84

Post by lemming »

rbanffy wrote: post #81
masklinn wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Their move from GCC to clang is no coincidence. Erm... what? Clang has already been ported to Windows (and other platforms). Their move from GCC to clang comes from GCC sucking goat's balls at error reporting and being integrated into an IDE. You might want to note Apple produces an IDE so that's kind-of a big deal for them, and a big reason for the existence of LLVM and related technologies (Clang, LLDB, ...) is v…

Clang/LLVM is BSD while GCC is GPL. That means Apple can extend them all they want without ever giving you, or their competition, any sources. If they ever perceive a threat from their competition, Clang/LLVM provides a lot more maneuvering space than GCC ever would. And yes, GCC is a very hard thing to integrate into tools and it's that way by design.

And yes, GCC is a very hard thing to integrate into tools and it's that way by design.

Any reference for that claim? This would seem to be an absurd design decision. It's more work to design this way but the benefits are enormous.

Re: Apple deprecates Java

#85

Post by fauigerzigerk »

JeremyBanks wrote: post #83
fauigerzigerk wrote: post #31

This could be good news for anyone who uses a Mac to work with Java. There could finally be a JDK for OS X that doesn't lag years behind official Java releases. On the other hand, the margin between Apple not supporting something and Apple banning something is incredibly narrow. Steve Jobs doesn't seem to understand the difference between choice and fragmentation very well.

Banning? I think that seems rather unlikely. To my knowledge Apple's never done anything of the sort on the desktop. On mobile platforms users are more accustomed to having restrictions in place, but if they banned Java on Mac OS the backlash would be immense.

An outright ban does indeed seem remote, but if they start to tie software installation/update/maintainance on the Mac to the Mac AppStore and ban Java apps from the AppStore, the effect on end users' ability to use Java applications is tantamount to a ban.

Re: Apple deprecates Java

#86

Post by dingle_thunk »

fdb wrote: post #46

So then what's the best way to do cross-platform development? For all its faults, Java does deliver something that resembles the "write once, run anywhere" dream. Any idea for a high-performance, cross-platform, native UI development stack? Is C++/Objective-C still the best option?

Adobe Air, Silverlight/Moonlight Out-of-Browser, Mono, HTML5/JS.

Re: Apple deprecates Java

#88

Post by roel_v »

pmjordan wrote: post #61
FooBarWidget wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which close button are you talking about and how is it inherent to GTK?

I'm guessing the close button on dockable floating windows. Is there an implementation of GTK that doesn't run via X11 on the mac? Gimp/Inkscape are lovely software on Linux, but using them on the Mac drives me insane. They're "meh" on Windows. I concluded a while back that the only decent way to do GUI programming properly was to develop multiple native frontends for the platforms you want to support. Everything els…

"I concluded a while back that the only decent way to do GUI programming properly was to develop multiple native frontends for the platforms you want to support. Everything else seems to produce crap."

This +100. Qt is OK-ish if dev resources are a bigger concern than platform integration, Gtk is not even remotely integrated with the platforma (well except in a Gnome desktop where it basically is the platform), and all the other attempts like wxWidgets, Tcl/Tk and the hundreds of smaller projects/products don't even come close.

Anyone developing desktop software who want to make his application feel 'native' to each platform has to make various frontends, with each platform's native UI toolkit. It takes some careful design but it's not all that painful, really.

Re: Apple deprecates Java

#89

Post by celias »

rmc wrote: post #66
lyso wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However it isn't just the Cocoa bindings that are important. AFAIK SoyLatte's Swing/AWT elements run through X11. Apple's Java allows for Java GUIs without starting X11.

X11 is horrible on OSX. Applications that use it (e.g. The GIMP on OSX), are terrible and have many usability flaws, such as no clipboard between an X11 application and a normal application.

Have you tried xquartz from http://xquartz.macosforge.org/ ? I am able to copy/paste between WingIDE and GIMP and native OS X apps using xquartz. There are issues such as switching between X11 and native apps, but it works better than the X11 distributed with OS X.

Re: Apple deprecates Java

#90

Post by Someone »

lemming wrote: post #84
rbanffy wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clang/LLVM is BSD while GCC is GPL. That means Apple can extend them all they want without ever giving you, or their competition, any sources. If they ever perceive a threat from their competition, Clang/LLVM provides a lot more maneuvering space than GCC ever would. And yes, GCC is a very hard thing to integrate into tools and it's that way by design.

And yes, GCC is a very hard thing to integrate into tools and it's that way by design. Any reference for that claim? This would seem to be an absurd design decision. It's more work to design this way but the benefits are enormous.

http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/GCC_Plugins gives some background.
Post reply on HN