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

[Paulo Pinto via Digitalmars-d]

Am 17.05.2014 20:12, schrieb Nick Sabalausky:
> 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.

They haven't. That is the whole point.

It is well known among Java developers with Android experience, that 
Dalvik is a kind of good enough implementation, without much effort. 
Almost as a modern BASIC.

It only had improvements on 2.2 (got a JIT), 2.3 (small improvements and 
a little bette GC) and 4.3 (a few more intrisics).

The original Dalvik architect is no longer in the team.

I am waiting eagerly for the Google IO ART session to see how the new 
AOT compiler behaves. Specially when compared with MIDL .NET compilers.

>
> (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.)
>

They basically implemented the original model of .NET. Based on the 
available documentation, COM+ VOS as it was called is quite similar to 
WinRT. Then Java happenend, and another design approach was done.

 From the MSDN blogs, it seems the native side has been getting strong 
since the Longhorn failure, which lead to WinRT, RyuJIT, .NET Native and 
stronger focus on C++. This is my opinion, not sure how well it
matches reality.

--
Paulo