Can I use Newspeak-lang on ios?

S Waraphan

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Feb 6, 2014, 1:32:12 PM2/6/14

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Is it possible that NS will work as Ipad app on IOS?

best regards
Waraphan

Gilad Bracha

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Feb 6, 2014, 2:00:30 PM2/6/14

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Not really. iOS deliberately makes life hard for "foreign" languages like Newspeak. The closest you can come is to compile to Javascript and run in a browser, where things are coming along nicely, though not yet complete.

If you want to get an idea of what is possible, You can see a few ready made web samples at

https://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/rmacnak/

To understand how this they work get the latest bleeding edge image from

https://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/rmacnak/bootimages/

You can then load some examples from samples repo at

https://bitbucket.org/newspeaklanguage/samples

and see the source. You can run them in a browser using the "deploy as web page" option. Some of them run identically in the image as well.

For real iOS apps it will be while.

People try and build apps based on Web views, but Apple sabotages that by making sure the web view implementation is slow.

We've thought about different options. There is a version of Squeak that runs on iOS and we could adapt that - but it is very slow because Apple won't allow you to have a JIT. It is also a considerable amount of work, since the NSVM is not a plain Squeak implementation.

Compiling to Objective-C is perhaps a better option. Since Objective-C doesn't do true garbage collection, that is a challenge. Ideally, one implements one's own GC - a lot of work. It may be that the life cycle of apps on mobile is such that one can get away without GC, as apps must persist important information anyway and get swapped out often but this seems brittle.

Longer term, perhaps we'll have a Dart implementation we can target - but even Dart will be limited by the absence of a JIT.

In summary, between Apple's ban on JITs, absence of GC and lobotomization of web views, it is hard to do innovative language work on iOS. If we saw an attractive path we might put work into it, but our resources are very limited and so we focus on the web.

--
Cheers, Gilad

Joe Shirk

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Aug 2, 2015, 9:10:02 AM8/2/15

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These are gone now, but something to replace them might turn up here:

https://github.com/rmacnak-google

https://github.com/rmacnak

I hope so, because I'd like to make Android and iOS Single Page Applications and implement IPFS.io. I've been thinking about doing this in Amber Smalltalk, but I'd rather do it once in Newspeak and be able to export it to JS.