Uphill

[Paulo Pinto via Digitalmars-d]

On Sunday, 31 May 2015 at 09:08:28 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> On Sunday, 31 May 2015 at 07:54:29 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
>> However, C++ seems to be really into the route of library only 
>> language if we look at how it is available on mobile OS, only 
>> as complement to the main languages, not as the language under 
>> the spotlight.
>>
>> Even on WinRT, C++/CX doesn't seem to get many followers 
>> outside the game developers world. To the point that Windows 
>> 10 will also expose DirectX as WinRT components (on 8.x it is 
>> only directly available to C++).
>
> You seem to dismiss game development as some niche, when it is 
> one of the main killer apps driving the mobile boom.  Around 
> 80% of the top paid apps on iOS and Android are games:
>
> https://www.appannie.com/apps/google-play/top/united-states/


I don't know how you got to understand that. My point was that 
C++/CX was pushed
to be at the same level as C# and VB.NET for WinRT applications, 
specially for
the MFC users.

However, apparently only game developers cared to pick it up and 
it has been ignored by traditional business developers, this was 
my point.

And a big complaint was having to manually make use of COM 
interop to access DirectX from .NET languages or being forced to 
write WinRT wrappers in C++/CX.

So as of Windows 10, DirectX is also exposed as WinRT compoments.

>
> Most mobile games are written in C/C++/OpenGL, to the point 
> where google even makes their Play Games Services APIs 
> available as C++ headers, which they don't do for most of the 
> rest of their Java-only APIs:
>
> https://developers.google.com/games/services/cpp/gettingStartedAndroid
>

If you knew Android development, you would know that Google Games 
API was Java only.

Here are the videos from Google explaining to NDK users how to 
write themselves the respective JNI wrappers to the API.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zst3R1OP6Y0

Only after a huge backslash from game developers did they port 
the API to C++.


In many cases those games are being written in Java (LibGDX), 
Unity, Cocos-2D, with C++ for the graphics and sound layer only.


> As for WinRT, almost nobody uses Windows Phone and Windows 8 
> was a huge bust, especially Modern apps, so that's neither here 
> nor there.

Nobody in US, yes.


In South America, Eastern Europe and some southern Europe 
countries it is a bit different.

In Portugal for example, you will see more people with Android 
and Windows Phone than iOS.


>
> You're right that google keeps pushing Java into the spotlight, 
> but it is native development that is actually doing well, 
> pushing Java back into library mode for google's Java-only 
> APIs.  Perhaps that's why they compile Java Ahead-Of-Time since 
> the recent Lollipop release. :)

They are late to the game there. As Android was the only platform 
still using a JIT.

iOS never used one and Windows Phone 8 always had .NET compiled 
to native code.

Dalvik was just a lame "good enough" VM implementation, so I 
guess they really needed to do something there.

--
Paulo