“Adds iOS build support to gomobile command”

https://go-review.googlesource.com/#/c/11587/8

by ConceitedCode • 11 years ago

128 59 11 years ago

go-review.googlesource.com

pbreit• 11 years ago

What exactly does this enable?

zaroth• 11 years ago

Here's some good examples: https://medium.com/using-go-in-mobile-apps

Judging from the popping a dialog example, I think the main use case is reusing a Go library inside an iOS app, not any kind of standalone app development entirely with Go. At least, not without a lot of helper libraries which don't exist yet!

crazychrome• 11 years ago

I don't think the fruit company will approve apps programmed other than objc or swift.

ssutch3• 11 years ago

They have been for a long time now. Apps are commonly written in Java, Javascript, scripting in lua, python, etc. The only thing they don't allow is executable pages of memory, which the Go previously required due to it's runtime.

jkrems• 11 years ago

Aren't they already approving apps written in C#? What's different about Go?

matthewmacleod• 11 years ago

They've been doing that for ages already.

Please do at least a cursory bit of research before commenting about an area you're clearly not familiar with! It will save a lot of time, and prevent FUD like this from continuing to spread.

hughw• 11 years ago

Well, I'm glad he asked, because I didn't know all these languages mentioned in the responses, were supported on iOS and the App Store.

coldtea• 11 years ago

Apple has been accepting apps in all kinds of languages for years, including: Lua, C#, Racket, JS+native wrappers, Java, C, C++, Ruby, Python, etc.

Their current guidelines only prohibit dynamic code download (that is: installable plugins from outside the App Store):

3.3.2 An Application may not download or install executable code. Interpreted code may only be used in an Application if all scripts, code and interpreters are packaged in the Application and not downloaded. The only exception to the foregoing is scripts and code downloaded and run by Apple’s built-in WebKit framework.

wiremine2• 11 years ago

So, let me get this straight:

* You can write part of your app in Go

* You can share that code across your Android and iOS apps?

Is that right? If so, seems like a solid use case for Go. Until Swift compiles to Android...

anonova• 11 years ago

I currently do this with Rust, as it can target both iOS [1] and Android [2], but you do have to build your own cross-compiler.

[1] https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-wiki-backup/blob/master/Do...

[2] https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-wiki-backup/blob/master/Do...

rkapsoro• 11 years ago

Hey, if you can share, in what kind of project are you using shared Rust code on both iOS and Android? That's pretty awesome!

McElroy• 11 years ago

I had no idea. Thanks!

aikah• 11 years ago

it's a good replacement for C if you were using it in Android or Ios. But you can't write classic Android or Ios apps with Go.You can however use Opengl so potentially write games, but using Cocoa and co? zip. Go on android doesn't even support android's own NDK ...

steinnes• 11 years ago

Yeah, being able to compile and link a binary is pretty far from having a nice SDK :-)

akhilcacharya2• 11 years ago

Is it really that beneficial to do this? Your system API's are still in Java/Obj-C/Swift, so all you can really share is business logic.

Has anybody had any real benefit from doing this in the past? I know Facebook did it with moments, but the image processing code could at least be shared here.

tl• 11 years ago

Depending on how you structure your application, "business logic" may include persistence, network code, and everything that's not UI.

threeseed• 11 years ago

And even 99% of the business logic these days is pushed server side.

I've worked on about 20 enterprise apps and they are nothing more than pretty API wrappers with some trivial functionality implemented on the phone.

sandGorgon2• 11 years ago

is that still correct after the Dalvik -> ART move ? I always thought a long term strategy around ART was to move away from the jvm dependency.

Just in time for all the Oracle lawsuits confirming that Java apis are patent encumbered.

giaour• 11 years ago

If you're writing games, you aren't using those Java/Obj-C/Swift APIs; you're using the C API.

That's the use case they're targeting. They want Go to be a viable language for mobile games, not mobile apps.

dunham• 11 years ago

Google does it with Inbox. They have Java business logic that they cross-compile to Javascript on the web, ObjC on iOS, and run as-is on Android. The respective UIs are done natively on the respective platforms. (Surprisingly, they do not use GWT for the web UI.)

I guess there is a lot of complex logic in there, the GWT chunk is a good megabyte or so, if I remember right. I think it's all syncing and conflict resolution stuff, but it's hard to tell for sure. (GWT code is optimized/compacted enough that I only have the string constants to go on.)

timothya• 11 years ago

It's possible to have significant amounts of business logic. Google is able to share 70% of it's code (written in Java) for the Google Inbox apps[0][1].

[0] http://gmailblog.blogspot.ca/2014/11/going-under-hood-of-inb...

[1] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/11/how-go...

0x0• 11 years ago

You can do that with C and C++ as well. It's the native platform framework interfacing problem that usually makes this not as amazing as it sounds

wiremine2• 11 years ago

Agreed. I guess the most amazing part is that you don't need C or C++.

mahyarm6• 11 years ago

You can actually do that with a lot of languages now. C# with xamarin, java/clojure with robovm, java with j2objc, etc.

I was tempted with robovm, but found the 30s minimum build & run cycle for trivial code changes too slow for me.

And the performance is pretty good for these guys, they're all as fast as objective-c:

https://medium.com/@harrycheung/mobile-app-performance-redux...

At my last job we did the C++ cross platform layer, and it was very painful. C++ is slow to compile and can create bloated binaries. There can be something said for the freedom of having separate platform teams with just a server api.

chetanahuja2• 11 years ago

"makes this not as amazing as it sounds"

It's actually pretty amazing. C/C++ has lots and lots of well established, well tested, open source code in every possible domain. There's also a pretty large base of programmers familiar with the language. There's no dearth of tooling on any platform. And you can do pretty much anything you want to squeeze performance out of the mobile platform (think watches).

If you can write bulk of your business logic as a C/C++ library with clear API's to call into it, then you can simply compile it directly into the ObjC code on iOS and add a thin JNI wrapper on those API's on Android. It works beautifully. We do this for our mobile specific protocol code.

nileshk• 11 years ago

Haven't tried this myself, but Swift compiles to Android:

http://elementscompiler.com/elements/silver/

pjmlp4• 11 years ago

It doesn't save you from JNI or Objective-C/Swift fun.

Regardless of what is going on with Oracle, the Android team sees the NDK as a nuisance and only offers NDK APIs suitable for games.

How does Go represent UIkit and similar APIs?

eva1984• 11 years ago

Which part of the application can be shared between iOS and Android apps that is most suitable to write in Go? Data layer, like communication protocol?

hobarrera• 11 years ago

go has issues on IPv6 clients, so not communication.

Probably the business logic, which is what least needs to interact with the OS APIs.

aaronbrethorst2• 11 years ago

Dear mods: please stop 'de-editorializing' headlines when the alternative won't make any sense. The new title for this link is nigh-unintelligible.

(the previous title was something like "Go 1.5 will add support for building iOS apps")

theGimp• 11 years ago

Agreed. I'm all for cracking down on title bait, but this is just going too far. This submission had a clear, descriptive title, and now it completely lacks context.

baijum• 11 years ago

I submitted this news few hours back with that title based on the tweet:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9812968

Edit: not exact same title, but similar.

dang2• 11 years ago

Take the sample bias out of your request and generalize it to all of HN, and what you're asking will no longer sound so trivial.

Submitters make up titles all the time that are (to use the sibling comment's words) "clear, descriptive", and wrong. Set aside the fact that HN's rules explicitly ask people not to do that. What would you have us do?

If you say "never change them", that would flood HN with false and manipulative titles forever. (Not that this one was false and manipulative—I wouldn't know. But I do know that that would be the consequence of never changing titles.) If you say "change the ones that are false and keep the ones that are true", you're asking us to be experts on everything.

The submitted title was "Go 1.5 will have iOS support". The submitted web page says nothing of the sort. What should we do? Being an expert on the Go project's internal progress—that is, being an expert on everything in the general case—is not an option. So we look for language in the article itself that is representative of what it says. That has two merits: (1) it preserves the neutral quality of HN's front page and (2) it's doable.

If you'd like to propose a change that doesn't demand superhuman powers of us and wouldn't destroy the character of HN, please do. But getting upset over a single suboptimal example doesn't seem serious to me. HN sees a thousand stories a day. Not every example is going to come out optimal no matter what we do.

harperlee• 11 years ago

Set aside the fact that HN's rules explicitly ask people not to do that.

Didn't know that. Why don't remind that on the "Post to YC" page?

aaronbrethorst2• 11 years ago

Hi Dan - fair point. To be pedantic, though, the title of this article should then be

    Change Ibc23b6d3: cmd/gomobile: enable target=ios
    builds | go-review.googlesource Code Review

which a) doesn't fit, and b) doesn't make any sense. A potential technical fix would be to allow both titles and descriptions on posts with URLs.

avinassh• 11 years ago

OT: Does Gerrit provide any extra features helping in code review, compared to Github? We use Github and it does fine.

uxp• 11 years ago

Gerrit and GitHub provide two different paradigms. If you want a straightforward answer, then yes Gerrit provides a number of extra features, but it isn't a replacement for GitHub.

piotrkaminski• 11 years ago

Yeah, it does -- I'll let somebody who knows it better fill you in, but it really is night and day if you're serious about reviewing code. If you'd like to try a more powerful code review system than GitHub's to see what you're missing, without spending lots of time setting up and learning Gerrit, I'd recommend giving https://reviewable.io a whirl. (Disclosure: I built it.)

Gys• 11 years ago

So this make something similar as Cordova possible ? Running a local webserver with all logic, serving html5/css/js as GUI ? Would still need bindings for accelerator and such (just as Cordova) but maybe its possible to use the ones Cordova already has ?

“Adds iOS build support to gomobile command”

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