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Facebook Has a New Private Mobile Photo-Sharing App, and They Built It In C++
jfruh writes: Facebook [on Monday] announced Moments, a new mobile app that uses Facebook's facial recognition technology to let you sync up photos only with friends who are in those photos with you. Somewhat unusually for a new app, the bulk of it is built in the venerable C++ language, which turned out to be easier for building a cross-platform mobile app than other more "modern" languages.
I'd like to add that with employers intruding more and more on our personal lives - we are on the clock 24/7 these days even though we're only paid for 40 hours. They are starting to scrutinize every aspect of our lives.
And what I find disturbing is that younger folks, who grew up with facebook and other crap like that, think nothing of posting pictures of parties or other gatherings where one might be doing something that your current or future employer may find objectionable.
I am more paranoid about what a backgroundcheck would turn up than even government persecution - I haven't started hiding Mulsims from stormtroopers yet in my basement. But being denied employment because someone put a photo of me holding a tray of shots and hanging out with some cross dressing friends frightens me. The job is too capricious and managing ones image is extremely important - and it is a sucky World that we live in - thanks corporate America for having privatized Stasi!
C++ is so flexible that you can write all your nasty "legwork" code (performance-sensitive stuff, like the actual facial recognition, image data manipulation, etc.) *once* and call it from whatever UI layer you write.
Granted, it's probably somewhere between hard and impossible to write a mobile platform-agnostic UI layer that actually looks good on both Android and iOS, since iOS and Android are so different in that regard; but even if they didn't bother doing that and just wrote two entirely separate view layers, they still can separate out all the heavy lifting and "write once, compile in two places". Both Android and iOS have decent to good C++ support, so if you make it platform-independent, you can have an optimized core library that works on the two major mobile platforms with no modifications.
Not sure I would go with C++ for something that was less performance-sensitive, but in this case, they can probably peg the CPU of a modern smartphone for at least a good fraction of a second with some of their heavier code.
Unless of course they are simply taking the image and uploading it to "the cloud" to do the facial recognition, in which case it's kind of a head-scratcher, since you don't need C++ to make HTTP requests.
If the vast majority of the new generation manage to piss off future employers, what are these businesses going to do, not hire anyone at all? Because they certainly aren't going to start hiring 50 year olds.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I'm completely ignoring the "Facebook" part of this announcement. What's news to me is that (most of) an app on any mobile platform can actually be written in C++ instead of Java or Swift. I quite seriously had no idea this could be done. The few times I've dabbled in Android development, for example, absolutely everything centered around Java. I've never played with iOS development because I don't have a suitable device, but I assumed you had to go with Objective C or Swift.
Where do I get started building Android apps in C++? Inquiring minds suddenly want to know.
Anything that has to be shipped outside your own organisation really has to be written in C++.
Look at the alternatives for commercial development of retail applications:
- Java - no good gui toolkits, resource hungry and bad latency. It is _possible_ to use, but never seems to be as performant as a native choice. Requires JVM. Contaminated and effectively dead as a platform as a result of Oracle's extremely, extremely, extremely extreme view on API copyrights, so not an option in my company any more sadly. Oracle really scared our lawyers, however crazy us technical people consider Oracle management to be, and however unlikely they are to prevail. SWT was the best toolkit I used for java GUIs. Definitely shippable.
- C#/.NET - no portable choices for GUI toolkits. Shipping a binary mono that works everywhere is tricky on Linux due to dependencies on GTK. No acceptable portable UI toolkit. Winforms kind of works, but it actually rather clunky and nasty. My impression is that it performs better than java, I guess because we ahead of time compiled everything we built with it mostly.
- C++ - Qt, GTK, wxWidgets all work as commercially supportable toolkits. I have shipped Qt apps. The best GUI toolkit I have used on any platform, when used properly. Dependencies in C++ are simple and easy to manage. C++14 also offers a never nice improvement over C++98 - almost like a whole new language. The traditional reasons for avoiding C++ are gone. Sure, it may be a mental burden to less competent developers to learn properly, but do you want to employ incompetents anyway?
Of course, developing internal software, that doesn't need to be packaged and shipped on all customer's Linux and Windows is a completely different world.
In this world, I would probably go with a mixture of C++ and C#, depending on project requirements.
Where do I get started building Android apps in C++? Inquiring minds suddenly want to know.
The latest versions of Qt5 support building Qt/C++ apps for Android and iOS. I've never tried it for more than running a few examples, but it seems pretty nice and easy, and I've really enjoyed Qt development for years now.
Facebook has some actually competent coders that do not need to be coddled and do not start to cry if the language they use requires some actual understanding?
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.