A debate about "slight" versus "significant" strikes me as silly. The page you linked to shows that the phone has a kernel that supports posix/BSD 4.4, and layered upon that are a lot of familiar APIs from the desktop version, with some things removed (printing, carbon,...) to reduce weight as appropriate for a mobile platform. UIKit is unique to the mobile version.
One could make a case for calling this slight - especially if juxtaposed against the architectural differences between the desktop and mobile versions of Windows. The iPhone OS is essentially NeXTstep on my phone. Windows Mobile is nowhere near "NT on a phone". So, in comparison between the two pairs, it is slight.
I suppose one could make a case for it being signifigant, as well -- but I'd be surprised if one could do it in a way that would undermine the validity of the other perspective. The page you linked to does as much to support "slight" as it does to support "significant".
But how would we ever know we've risen above that threshold if all such people pipe down until said conditions are met? I don't think you've thought this through.
OK, sorry to be so hard on you. It turns out that there are copious buttloads of languages that use some sort of bytecode under the hood. The thing that really makes it stick in your mind with Java is just that it's the format that you're expected to distribute your programs in. Contrast that with Python: The reference implementation (CPython) is also a bytecode interpreter. I'm not sure, it may be possible to distribute a python program in bytecode, but I've neither seen nor heard of anyone doing it. Other interpreted languages are currently moving towards a bytecode-based implementation (Ruby is moving to YARV, Perl to Parrot...) and some implementations are even attempting to be self-hosting yet fast.
Google the term "PyPy", for example. It's a daring implementation of Python written in a strict subset of Python called RPython. It plans to use the LLVM infrastructure to eventually become competitive with the performance of the CPython interpreter. Pretty cool stuff!
Your analysis has merit in terms of survival with respect to the modern environment, but the current crop of women (remember the women, the topic of this thread?) have mechanisms for detecting alpha-ness that were forged in the environmental context of deep-history. One can't make a reasoned case to a woman about why she ought find you to be more alpha than a broad-shouldered, square-jawed, chest-pounding beast with a wide-stance and a calm, confident demeanor.
Well, you can make the reasoned case -- but don't expect it to stoke her fire.
Speaking of, where did the computer-science demographic on slashdot make off to? You know, the guys who are aware of historical minutiae like the time-honored milestone of a programming language becoming self-hosting? Just asking.
...but the military is full of men who exhibit alpha-male traits, while the guys in CS are typically in a perpetual state of beta â" with only dreams of sweet release.
Who said that? OK...why not provide such a product for those that want it? Why?
The sad reality is that "the unix/linux way" is entirely up to those who contribute code. On the bright side, anyone who wants to redefine "the way" has a clear course of action.
The most telling fact is that the firm that reached out to the media yesterday to explain that this sudden shift was supposedly the plan all along was not Crispin Porter, the advertising agency producing the campaign, but Waggener Edstrom, Microsoft's PR firm. Advertising campaigns which are going according to plan do not need PR firms to assert such.
However it does the same thing on OS X, so if you're comfortable with that experience you might not notice that it's not up to snuff with IE and Firefox in the stability department.
Right, because - as every software engineer knows - all people encounter all bugs equally, and all bugs are trivially reproducible.
...and note that I'm certainly not blaming them or indicating that they were remiss in not having taken Safari/Win for a test drive. I'm merely intrigued that it appears that Chrome will likely expand WebKit uptake rather than eating into existing WebKit usage. Which is great news for people interested in quality implementations of web standards.
Well, the observation that I made was not that they would never use Safari/Win, but that they would never even try it. In my own experience with Safari/Win on my XP test machine, I've never encountered any bugs, so obviously everyone's mileage may vary. But my point is that Chrome could tap into a demographic who would normally dismiss Safari/Win without even giving it a fair shake.
Yes, I agree that the process separation is a great feature, and I look forward to the release of a version for MacOS X. Interestingly, this isn't what was making the sale here.
And as for the Javascript performance, while V8 is getting awesome benchmarks, it's hard for a user to perceive the difference in normal usage - unless you're running something that animates drawing in a canvas, perhaps.
In our case, we have an internal javascript-heavy application written in GWT that compiles down to 600KB of javascript in obfuscated mode. At least on the XP test box sitting beside my Mac, I couldn't tell the difference between Safari/Win and Chrome. The difference between those and IE is dramatic, of course. And comparing them to FF3 (without tracemonkey) was merely noticable, although not dramatic.
That doesn't stop me from drooling over V8 when I run Sunspider, though. I love that the JavaScript runtime wars are heating up. I'd love to have headroom to do more.
In my office, there are several windows developers who were excited to try Chrome yesterday - one enthusiastically declaring that he was going to uninstall his other browser as soon as he got home. What struck me about this is that these are people who would never, in a million years, lift a finger to try Safari/Windows - yet here they are drooling over how snappy a WebKit-based browser is. The prospect of increased WebKit adoption makes me happy.
It strikes me that if FF can replace its current javascript interpreter with Tracemonkey without fundamentally changing the javascript API that web developers see, then it should be just as possible for Chrome to replace JavaScriptCore with V8 just as seamlessly.
Why doesn't Google just contribute code to Mozilla for Firefox
If they had, then one could easily ask the parallel question: why didn't Google just contribute to WebKit? Both are open source. They had to choose one over the other. I personally think they made an excellent choice.
I hate being turned into a Microsoft apologist on this one, but give them a break. IE8 is still beta. Comparing release quality software to beta quality software is simply unfair.
I couldn't agree more. We could easily see Microsoft slipping in major architectural changes in beta 3. After all, that's what betas are for!
glib (adj) fluent and voluble but insincere and shallow
I suppose "fluent" counts since the comment was both accurate and brief, but the brevity argues against "voluble", and I have no reason to suspect eebra82's sincerity on the matter. Also, given Microsoft's track record in the area, it comes across as an astute observation, rather than a shallow one. In short, Inigo Montoya has a sound bite for you.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm with you on this one. The only card I'd be interested in seeing the benchmarks on is the fastest one with a mere heatsink.
A debate about "slight" versus "significant" strikes me as silly. The page you linked to shows that the phone has a kernel that supports posix/BSD 4.4, and layered upon that are a lot of familiar APIs from the desktop version, with some things removed (printing, carbon,...) to reduce weight as appropriate for a mobile platform. UIKit is unique to the mobile version.
One could make a case for calling this slight - especially if juxtaposed against the architectural differences between the desktop and mobile versions of Windows. The iPhone OS is essentially NeXTstep on my phone. Windows Mobile is nowhere near "NT on a phone". So, in comparison between the two pairs, it is slight.
I suppose one could make a case for it being signifigant, as well -- but I'd be surprised if one could do it in a way that would undermine the validity of the other perspective. The page you linked to does as much to support "slight" as it does to support "significant".
But how would we ever know we've risen above that threshold if all such people pipe down until said conditions are met? I don't think you've thought this through.
OK, sorry to be so hard on you. It turns out that there are copious buttloads of languages that use some sort of bytecode under the hood. The thing that really makes it stick in your mind with Java is just that it's the format that you're expected to distribute your programs in. Contrast that with Python: The reference implementation (CPython) is also a bytecode interpreter. I'm not sure, it may be possible to distribute a python program in bytecode, but I've neither seen nor heard of anyone doing it. Other interpreted languages are currently moving towards a bytecode-based implementation (Ruby is moving to YARV, Perl to Parrot...) and some implementations are even attempting to be self-hosting yet fast.
Google the term "PyPy", for example. It's a daring implementation of Python written in a strict subset of Python called RPython. It plans to use the LLVM infrastructure to eventually become competitive with the performance of the CPython interpreter. Pretty cool stuff!
Your analysis has merit in terms of survival with respect to the modern environment, but the current crop of women (remember the women, the topic of this thread?) have mechanisms for detecting alpha-ness that were forged in the environmental context of deep-history. One can't make a reasoned case to a woman about why she ought find you to be more alpha than a broad-shouldered, square-jawed, chest-pounding beast with a wide-stance and a calm, confident demeanor.
Well, you can make the reasoned case -- but don't expect it to stoke her fire.
Speaking of, where did the computer-science demographic on slashdot make off to? You know, the guys who are aware of historical minutiae like the time-honored milestone of a programming language becoming self-hosting? Just asking.
...but the military is full of men who exhibit alpha-male traits, while the guys in CS are typically in a perpetual state of beta â" with only dreams of sweet release.
...sweeping under the rug, of course, the fact that it went to another planet. :
No, no, we do need to send a human there.
I nominate Sarah Palin. Don't worry, she's qualified: she can see mars from her back yard.
Who said that? OK...why not provide such a product for those that want it? Why?
The sad reality is that "the unix/linux way" is entirely up to those who contribute code. On the bright side, anyone who wants to redefine "the way" has a clear course of action.
I think John Gruber has the most sensible take on Microsoft's claim that this was planned all along:
The most telling fact is that the firm that reached out to the media yesterday to explain that this sudden shift was supposedly the plan all along was not Crispin Porter, the advertising agency producing the campaign, but Waggener Edstrom, Microsoft's PR firm. Advertising campaigns which are going according to plan do not need PR firms to assert such.
However it does the same thing on OS X, so if you're comfortable with that experience you might not notice that it's not up to snuff with IE and Firefox in the stability department.
Right, because - as every software engineer knows - all people encounter all bugs equally, and all bugs are trivially reproducible.
You assume they make good products for every platform,
I'm sorry, but I don't see where I'm making that assumption at all. I think you're misreading me.
...and note that I'm certainly not blaming them or indicating that they were remiss in not having taken Safari/Win for a test drive. I'm merely intrigued that it appears that Chrome will likely expand WebKit uptake rather than eating into existing WebKit usage. Which is great news for people interested in quality implementations of web standards.
Well, the observation that I made was not that they would never use Safari/Win, but that they would never even try it. In my own experience with Safari/Win on my XP test machine, I've never encountered any bugs, so obviously everyone's mileage may vary. But my point is that Chrome could tap into a demographic who would normally dismiss Safari/Win without even giving it a fair shake.
Yes, I agree that the process separation is a great feature, and I look forward to the release of a version for MacOS X. Interestingly, this isn't what was making the sale here.
And as for the Javascript performance, while V8 is getting awesome benchmarks, it's hard for a user to perceive the difference in normal usage - unless you're running something that animates drawing in a canvas, perhaps.
In our case, we have an internal javascript-heavy application written in GWT that compiles down to 600KB of javascript in obfuscated mode. At least on the XP test box sitting beside my Mac, I couldn't tell the difference between Safari/Win and Chrome. The difference between those and IE is dramatic, of course. And comparing them to FF3 (without tracemonkey) was merely noticable, although not dramatic.
That doesn't stop me from drooling over V8 when I run Sunspider, though. I love that the JavaScript runtime wars are heating up. I'd love to have headroom to do more.
Did they use large chunks of other open-source browsers? If so, which ones?
Yes, they chose the WebKit rendering engine, which is the same one you find in browsers like Konqueror, Safari, and Google's own Android platform.
In my office, there are several windows developers who were excited to try Chrome yesterday - one enthusiastically declaring that he was going to uninstall his other browser as soon as he got home. What struck me about this is that these are people who would never, in a million years, lift a finger to try Safari/Windows - yet here they are drooling over how snappy a WebKit-based browser is. The prospect of increased WebKit adoption makes me happy.
Like I already mentioned somewhere up in a reply, its fast and snappy.
Did everybody catch that? WebKit is teh snappy!
It strikes me that if FF can replace its current javascript interpreter with Tracemonkey without fundamentally changing the javascript API that web developers see, then it should be just as possible for Chrome to replace JavaScriptCore with V8 just as seamlessly.
Why doesn't Google just contribute code to Mozilla for Firefox
If they had, then one could easily ask the parallel question: why didn't Google just contribute to WebKit? Both are open source. They had to choose one over the other. I personally think they made an excellent choice.
Exactly. Because we all know that no effort could have gone into V8 before the day Google announced it.
I hate being turned into a Microsoft apologist on this one, but give them a break. IE8 is still beta. Comparing release quality software to beta quality software is simply unfair.
I couldn't agree more. We could easily see Microsoft slipping in major architectural changes in beta 3. After all, that's what betas are for!
glib (adj) fluent and voluble but insincere and shallow
I suppose "fluent" counts since the comment was both accurate and brief, but the brevity argues against "voluble", and I have no reason to suspect eebra82's sincerity on the matter. Also, given Microsoft's track record in the area, it comes across as an astute observation, rather than a shallow one. In short, Inigo Montoya has a sound bite for you.
AMEN. Don't listen to those who say you're whining or blowing it out of proportion. If we don't demand quality and conformance, it'll never happen.