Ask HN: Why is Google not making a language that runs on low memory devices?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17534136

by vijaybritto • 8 years ago

43 38 8 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I just used a low cost smartphone in India and honestly it was the worst I have ever used. I was wondering why is Google not making a language for low end mobiles that consume very less memory? We had glorious computer apps running in 512mb of RAM. Now all apps need a gig of memory to run without problems. Is this because of VM on Android? Is dart lang memory sensitive?

nitinreddy88• 8 years ago

In short, after 5years you will see devices with 8gb ram and 128gb storage at much lower price which can be offered by everyone. We are no longer living in the era of floppy disks where we need to optimise on RAM and storage space. We are moving towards the world where multiple tasks to be done efficiently using all the memory you can use. We are no longer designing for single efficient task.

chronid• 8 years ago

I'm not so sure.

Electronics works at different economies of scale than websites/web applications/saas, where usually (at least at the beginning) you will probably churn out bloated applications to "go fast and be lean" and say who cares since you can just relatively easily bring in another 64GB VM.

If you need to produce 10 million units spending 0.1$ less on each unit is a godsend, you instantly have 1 million dollars more for R&D (and/or possibly profits).

vijaybritto3• 8 years ago

No, you don't get it. The OS that is outselling android is Kai OS. It's a simple smartphone OS with basic stuff. The next billion users are already half way in and the market is open for capture. Waiting for a couple of years is not wise

mping• 8 years ago

No serious cash to be earned in that market? If you optimized software for low resources, I'm sure most websites would throw away js ads...

giancarlostoro2• 8 years ago

There are many reasons for this, mostly because we keep getting more hardware that can handle more not many optimize for lower spec hardware which I find sad. I want to be able to run much more apps with better hardware not the same amount of apps I could run 10 years ago (very limited number). With 16GB on my workstation at work I have to worry about opening up too much because as you say software takes up 512MB of RAM. I usually close all apps on my phone.

The only thing I saw Android doing was 'Android Lite' which Nokia plans on supporting only Android Lite. I too wonder where Google is going with Android, but I fear as many have suggested they only care about using it as a means to track people and lock them into their own services... Sadly Android could be so much more and they clearly have the resources to make it so and yet... Nothing.

I would love to see Microsoft take Android OS fork it and make something that isn't a Memory hog and conserves on energy someday.

kmbriedis• 8 years ago

Microsoft once already failed to promote a mobile OS which was ten times better than Android, why would they be successful with shitty Android fork...

klez• 8 years ago

Because they're different approaches. I would expect the "shitty" fork to be able to run Android apps, something that WP wasn't able to do, so developers had to support yet another platform for little gain.

If MS forked Android, made it snappy while keeping it compatible with existing apps, and if they did their marketing correctly I could see this carving a small but profitable (for some value of profitable) niche.

sp332• 8 years ago

Simple, their OS didn't have many apps, but a shitty Android fork gets zillions of them.

onetimemanytime• 8 years ago

By the time Google does it, prices memory /chip will drop drastically. But then Android will develop to use the new resources fully

dmayle• 8 years ago

I think you'll find that they are. Have you seen the Nokia 1 Android Go edition? It's a phone running an Android OS specifically targeted at low memory devices, along with low memory versions of it's apps suite (Google Go, YouTube Go, etc.). When it comes to programming languages, memory usage is usually more dictated by features (e.g. graphics, video) than by the programming language

vijaybritto3• 8 years ago

Btw these Google go and YouTube go are terrible to use in the cheap devices. So stuttery

treve• 8 years ago

The language itself is not the bottleneck, it's the shitty software everyone writes. Hardware is like an arms-race where it only takes a few months for the shiny new generation phones are as fast as the previous gen, because app developers rapidly can't justify the cost of keeping an app speedy on old hardware. This is why your phone feels slow, not because of the hardware or language.

srean3• 8 years ago

Wirth's Law: Software get slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster.

Not using more hardware resources than reasonable has stopped being a thing. A large section of software writers behave as if that the only purpose of the hardware is to run the app they wrote.

tomphoolery• 8 years ago

With tools like containers, the software itself behaves as if the only purpose of the hardware is to run your application. Psychologically, it makes sense for a software developer to believe this.

viraptor• 8 years ago

Don't mistake it for golang (unrelated name), but there's a suite of Go Google apps https://www.androidauthority.com/android-go-apps-820153/

They're aimed for lower spec phones with slightly reduced functionality, but still official / good quality.

_old_dude_• 8 years ago

Part of the problem is Java itself, it's too easy to add a 'binary' dependencies in Java, so applications get bloated.

Part of the problem is that Google remove the interpreter of Android so and AOT codes creates big executables which need to be loaded in memory.

Part of the problem is not Google but the fact that application makers test on flagship phones Pixels, Galaxy etc.

Part of the problem is that Google waits too long before introducing Go edition (available since Oreo) which re-introduce the interpreter and provides a clear target.

Part of the problem is that low cost smartphones is not where the money is, so there is no real insensitive to target low cost smartphones.

llukas• 8 years ago

All of those are not a problem if you want to address problem of low memory and design for it.

soziawa• 8 years ago

Sure, but if money is not an issue, why not get them a phone with more memory?

squarefoot• 8 years ago

forcing software to run under a virtual machine adds one more layer, so no matter how good software can be designed, compared to similarly optimized native software it will always mean more code to be executed, that is, more time needed to execute it and more space needed to contain it.

They used the VM approach for security reasons, which to me is terribly wrong. Mobile terminals should have hardware separation between subsystems, that is, the sensitive stuff (radio) enclosed in black hardware boxes where data goes in and comes out, just to make telcos happy, but everything else -I mean all the OS and apps- should be native and user accessible. This way one gets the best possible performance while maintaining a high degree of separation between kernel+userland and radio chipset which would let allow hacking whilst preventing anyone to tamper with cell connectivity.

polishTar• 8 years ago

Creating a new language for low memory apps is... probably not the right approach. Google does have an initiative to improve the experience on very limited resource devices though, it's called Android Go.

https://developer.android.com/google-play/guides/android-go-...

rurban• 8 years ago

This is not a language feature. We are talking about Dalvik here.

Low memory optimization means switching from a copying collector to a simple mark & sweep collector. It's entirely up to the vendor to configure that JVM collector. Nokia does so I believe.

SW bloat in apps and bad config tunings for autocompletion and other user configs also lead to bad UI responses on low-powered phones. Google is partially doing the right thing by providing all the frameworks by itself leading to reduced bloat. You just use the default library, in shared memory. But a problem is of course Google removing the interpreter, costing a lot of discspace and memory.

mg742• 8 years ago

Dart + Flutter compiles down to native ARM code. Don't know what the memory profile is but could be promising.

rektide• 8 years ago

Yeah. The OS to host this is, at the moment, called Fuschia. Definitely definitely definitely targeting low mem devices.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fuchsia

mg742• 8 years ago

Dart + Flutter is for building native iOS and Android apps. Fuchsia will surely be a target in the future, but it is not THE host for Flutter apps.

amelius• 8 years ago

But what happens if your memory-optimized phone visits a website running JS and which requires megabytes of memory?

jdietrich• 8 years ago

Google offer the Go edition of Android, which is designed for entry-level smartphones. It includes a range of first- and third-party applications that are designed to use less storage, RAM and mobile data.

https://www.android.com/versions/oreo-8-0/go-edition/

Software development is always a tradeoff between development time, features and performance optimisation. You can add more features in less time if you aren't too worried about performance. Most mobile developers neglect performance for simple financial reasons - it's an unfortunate fact that developing apps for low-income customers isn't very profitable. A user with a ₹4,000 Micromax phone probably isn't going to pay ₹200 for my app, but a user with a ₹60,000 Samsung phone might. No matter what Google do, a lot of apps are going to perform poorly on low-end devices.

srean3• 8 years ago

I have always wondered about the use of the 32 bit address space version (on an otherwise 64 bit CPU) of Linux and associated tool chain. Address space gets severely limited making threads hard but that specific problem we know how to solve. It would be a problem if your app really needs a lot of physical memory though. So its a trade off.

miga• 8 years ago

This is a tradeoff: memory gets cheaper http://www.maltiel-consulting.com/ISSCC-2013-Memory-trends-F..., and is much cheaper than time to learn exotic language. Today more important expensive are latency, bandwidth, and programmer time. Top reason for memory optimization nowadays is to reduce GC delays.

But if you really look for low memory languages, please try Forth https://www.forth.com/forth/ or Joy https://hypercubed.github.io/joy/joy.html. They may provide interactive environment in as little as 2kB https://www.mpeforth.com/xc7.htm#umbilical, and interactive debugging for deep space probes https://www.forth.com/resources/space-applications/

vijaybritto3• 8 years ago

I'm looking for apps that don't try too much and work in a good way in low powered devices. The next billion users are not getting a decent usable application. That's the point.

fulafel• 8 years ago

Check ou the history of Java (originally Oak), you might be surprised.

tastyham• 8 years ago

Because low cost smart phones is not their market.

csomar• 8 years ago

It's not the language, it is the developer. The developer can make trade-offs, optimize, test on different devices, etc...

In reality, this is expensive. Couple that with the fact that people who use low cost smartphones are not going to attract big capital, and thus they are left with average software developer.

Ask HN: Why is Google not making a language that runs on low memory devices?

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