Smart pointers instead of GC?

[Paulo Pinto]

On Tuesday, 4 February 2014 at 03:30:58 UTC, Manu wrote:
> On 4 February 2014 12:59, Andrei Alexandrescu 
> <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org
>> wrote:
>
>> On 2/3/14, 5:51 PM, Manu wrote:
>>
>>> I'd have trouble disagreeing more; Android is the essence of 
>>> why Java
>>> should never be used for user-facing applications.
>>> Android is jerky and jittery, has random pauses and lockups 
>>> all the
>>> time, and games on android always jitter and drop frames. 
>>> Most high-end
>>> games on android now are written in C++ as a means to 
>>> mitigate that
>>> problem, but then you're back writing C++. Yay!
>>> iOS is silky smooth by comparison to Android.
>>>
>>
>> Kinda difficult to explain the market success of Android.
>
>
> I think it's easy to explain.
> 1. It's aggressively backed by the biggest technology company 
> in the world.
> 2. It's free for product vendors.
> 3. For all product vendors at the curve of Android's success, 
> it presented
> a realistic and well supported (by Google) competition to 
> Apple, who were
> running away with the industry. Everybody had to compete with 
> Apple, but
> didn't have the resources to realistically compete on their 
> own. Nokia for
> instance were certainly in the best position to produce serious
> competition, but they fumbled multiple times. I suspect Google 
> won because
> they're Google, and it is free.
>
> Even Microsoft failed. C# is, for all intents and purposes, the 
> same as
> Java, except it's even better. If Java was a significant factor 
> in
> Android's success, I'd argue that WindowsMobile should have 
> been equally
> successful.
> I think it's safe to say, that's not the case.
> Personally, I suspect that Java was actually a barrier to entry 
> in early
> Android, and even possibly the reason that it took as it did 
> for Android to
> take root.
> It's most certainly the reason that Android had absolutely no 
> games on it
> for so many years. They eventually released the NDK, and games 
> finally
> appeared. There were years between Angry Birds success in 
> iPhone, and any
> serious games appearing on Android.
> There were years where if you wanted to play games in your 
> mobile device,
> you had to get an iDevice. It's finally levelled now that the 
> indisputable
> success of Android is absolute (and the NDK is available).

You forget to mention that the NDK has a very restrained set of 
APIs.

If you want to do interact with the OS besides audio and OpenGL, 
it is JNI Ad nauseam because Google sees the NDK as a minor 
inconvenience and all APIs are Java based.

Even Java native methods need to be called via their Java class 
and are not accessible to NDK code.

--
Paulo