Viktor Grigorov wrote (pm):
> Curious as to why you're pursuing this and what you'll do.

Jios (currently called j901 in App Store) is written in Swift 5, the
modern Apple alternative to Objective-C.

I originally conceived jios as a simple shell, the real work being done by
the open-source J engine (JE). But the interface: jios<>JE is fragile and
slow. Also, since JE is written in C, it lacks Swift's facility for
re-entrancy and parallelism, not to say: a good interface with all the
juicy Apple SDKs like SpriteKit, ARKit – and METAL.

Also there's the little question of security. iOS/iPadOS is a fortified
castle. But JE exists in a legacy world of open borders.

Jios makes many minor calls into JE for system services. But there's only
one call that matters: the one that drives the REPL the end-user interacts
with. I will gradually re-implement all the others in Swift.

Rewriting the entire JE in Swift is to swallow an elephant whole. But… how
do you eat an elephant? Answer: piece-by-piece.

I judge that writing a useful subset of JE in Swift to support the needs of
jios is a fairly easy task. One that will not divert me from my main focus:
UI/UX. I prefer to concentrate on what Bill Gates once called "putting
lipstick on a chicken." I don't aspire to be Colonel Sanders.🙂

Ian Clark

On Tue, 16 May 2023 at 11:25, Viktor Grigorov <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hey,
>
> Curious as to why you're persuing this and what you'll do.If you didn't
> mean 'private inquiry', you could reply in the mailing list thread.
> May 16, 2023, 10:59 by [email protected]:
>
> > Splendid, Devon! Exactly what I was searching j wiki for. I had a vague
> > recollection it was by you, and even did a search on "Devon" looking for
> it.
> >
> > …Needle in a haystack!
> >
> > I then tried Easy J, Simple J, EZJ, Core J, Elementary J, Micro J …  the
> > one word I didn't think to try was "minimal". But the exercise has left
> me
> > staggering in awe of the power of the Hive Mind that is the J forum
> (…fora).
> >
> > I guess "Minimal J" was just 2 pages. Did anyone ever write working code
> in
> > Devon's micro-language, to see how far they could push it?
> >
> > Together with Dan Bron's page on PrimitivePrimitives, this is material
> for
> > an intriguing weekend. Apple, going down a like path, has managed to
> > eliminate Intel from its product line. I take that as encouragement – or
> a
> > warning. I am not Tim Cook -- or Roger Hui.
> >
> > (BTW if anyone is curious to know why I'm pursuing this line of enquiry,
> > ask me.)
> >
> > Ian Clark
> >
>
>
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