Hi Kilon, 2014-06-19 16:17 GMT-03:00 kilon alios <kilon.al...@gmail.com>: > And not to sound out of topic VM on Android is the single most important > thing for the future of Pharo. Mobile market wont become smaller it will > become much larger. Because smartphones are really lately that have turned > into a full blow computers and people slowly realize it.
I disagree here. As an example, Android is switching its JIT runtime for an AOT one, because with JIT the performance (mostly related with UI perception) is slower than its iOS counterpart even when running on better hardware. Most of the popular apps use native multithreading intensively to maximize responsiveness. Pharo (as an organization) can't compete with that level of optimization, it doesn't have the budget for it. > How long before > most of those people realize that they dont need their desktop ? Software > migrates/ported constantly. Most people already realized that. But, IMO, the trend is not to move to mobile devices, but to cloud as a platform, or more exactly as a concept of always available and ubiquitous. Mobile is an enabler of ubiquity, it's not the end platform, and the cambric explosion of devices is a proof of that (phones, tablets, tvs, wearables, cars, who knows what...). Checkout a few "cloud based IDEs" to see what you can do today with those (eg: https://c9.io/ , https://codenvy.com/) Amber's Helios IDE is something that could enable that, backed by Pharo. > I definetly would love to have Pharo on my Nexus 4 one day and run smoothly. > I know its a lot of work, I don't expect it to happen any time soon, but > when the time will come my mobile phone will be "Pharo Powered" ;) Do you really want to have Pharo (for development) in a 5" screen? Or even in a 10" tablet? Have you tried using it? I did, and played around for a while. It was impressive that it ran bit identically. But that's all. Today's Pharo UI isn't close to be "mobile ready", in terms of UI design, architecture and by consequence performance. I don't find this a problem at all... unless you want to target mobile platforms. I mean... no one complains node.js doesn't have a good UI, and if there are some, it isn't their main strength. I'm not aware of a trend to have IntelliJ/Eclipse and/or XCode running on mobile devices, even when there is less "technology impedance" between their programming language and the supporting platform. Having all that said, I see use for Pharo in the mobile, in internet of things as mentioned earlier, for intensive custom UI apps and for games, where there is no expectation of "a native UI". Another handy usage would be to use it's "self containment" as an advantage to have a portable server stack or similar (assuming there is no dependency to local databases, etc.). And that's why when somebody says they're working on a VM for a mobile platform I ask "what for?", because I'd love to be proved wrong and learn about an unseen use case that could give us, Pharoers and Smalltalkers in general, an advantage. Regards,
