D to ASM.js vs D to Dart (VM)

[Nick Sabalausky via Digitalmars-d]

On 5/16/2014 3:53 PM, Joakim wrote:
> On Friday, 16 May 2014 at 14:15:20 UTC, Chris wrote:
>> Mind you, how many of the big "be all end all"-technologies that have
>> been hyped over the years are really good (including community base
>> projects)? JS, Java, Ajax, PHP, Ruby, iOS, Android ...? With good I
>> mean really good, not omnipresent.
>
> Agree with you on all of those, except for iOS.  I know many of us hate
> how much its success is driven by marketing, but it appears to be a very
> solid product technically.  At least that's what I read, I haven't
> bought an Apple product in a decade because of their crazy stance on
> patents and how closed they've become.
>
> However, just looking at iOS technically, even the latest iPad Air and
> iPhone 5s run on just 1 GB of RAM and still regularly outperform Android
> devices, which is crazy considering Android superphones/tablets have up
> to 3 GBs of RAM these days.  iOS devices repeatedly benchmark as the
> least laggy for touch.  Nick may not believe in people voting with their
> wallets, but iOS devices have garnered Apple a couple hundred billion in
> profits so far:
>
> http://www.phonearena.com/news/Samsung-and-Apple-reportedly-earned-87.9-of-the-smartphone-market-profits-for-the-last-6-years_id54030
>
>
> I suppose you can hate on Obj-C, but that's not really iOS.  The latest
> release got bogged down in all the bling, but that's more like Apple
> heaped too much icing on top: the cake is still great.
>
> Why isn't iOS good?

The problem with iOS devices isn't software bloat, it's overall design 
and, as you mentioned, Apple's...uhh...orwellian-ness. (IMO, anyway) I 
could go on and on and on about iPhone's design problems (and have done 
so ;) )

And I'm not surprised Android is a little slower/laggier than iOS, what 
with Dalvik. I don't care how much they've optimized it, a JVM-alike at 
the system-level on a mobile device is just asking for "second-place at 
best" (performance-wise anyway). They're now forced to go out of their 
way with stuff like ART just to mitigate some of the problems Dalvik 
introduced. That's the one big thing I *do* think Apple really got right 
- native system-level with ARC, instead of mobile JVM clone.

(FWIW/BTW, MS has actually hit a rather interesting middle-ground with 
WinRT's sort-of-a-VM-but-not-exactly approach. Not that I'm a fan of 
Win8/WinRT/Metro/MS/etc, but that particular aspect is quite noteworthy 
IMO.)

 > Nick may not believe in people voting with their wallets,

Well, to be clear (and without trying to get too political about it), I 
do believe in *attempting* to vote with one's wallet, and that it can be 
a *factor* in what succeeds and what doesn't. I just don't believe it's 
remotely close to being the sole primary factor or that it remotely 
implies "what succeeds must therefore be good". And I think all that's 
unfortunate.