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Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, May 09 2012 @ 12:11 PM EDT |
Dart is meant as a replacement for JavaScript, not Java. As an old comic goes,
Java is to JavaScript as ham is to hamster.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, May 12 2012 @ 07:28 PM EDT |
If we are looking for an alternative to Java for use on
Android etc., we
could just go with C++ as it compiles to
fast native code on most platforms, is
available on most
platforms etc.
The key limitations of C++ that need
to be dealt with in
such a project are:
- No garbage collection,
however this can be bolted on by
telling programmers not to store pointers in
non-pointer
variables nor pointers to (structures containing) pointers
as
void* or other types that do not indicate the presence of
those pointers, and
then using a tool that extracts the
needed subset of the type information from
compiler
generated debug information in order to create some simpler
binary
tables of what memory the GC engine should treat as
still-in-use
pointers.
- No interpreter enforced behavior limits. This would be
a
problem on Windows Phone and Java ME feature phones, but
Android (like Symbian
before it) has already solved this by
moving all enforcement to the process
boundary and therefore
allows unlimited native code in all programs without
sacrificing security.
- No compile-once-run-anywhere bytecode.
Microsoft's MSIL
and UCSD p-code almost provide that in a strong form, and
Dalvik could be extended with the missing instructions to
support full-blown
native like code.
[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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