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Comment by OoTheNigerian | Hacker News Reader

I am not a programmer so permit my probably naive questions.

1. How difficult will it be for Google to 're do" Android and base it on another language say Objective C/UNIX like iOS? 2. Do you guys think this will affect Symbian? 3. What other OS's will this affect? 4. Is MYSQL next?

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The answer to 1 is probably "very, but not impossible". They'd basically have to rewrite everything above kernel (which is Linux) from scratch. More importantly it would be a PR nightmare. Who wants to base their product on a platform where the platform owners are happy to throw away all your hard work and make you start from scratch every once in a while.

As to 2 and 3, this probably won't affect anybody else. Symbian (and everybody else) use an officially licensed JVM from Sun(now Oracle) and as such should be safe. The reason Google is in trouble is that the wrote their own VM rather than licensing the VM from Oracle.

As to 4. Well that's anyone's guess.

Re 4, I would add that if you have already started to think hard about moving away from MySQL, you really should now.

That's pretty odd thinking.

If I'm running MySQL on some servers, and it works great, it's not going to suddenly explode, or stop working.

But Oracle may suddenly change the licensing at some point in the future to something more onerous, so it would behoove you to consider not getting locked into MySQL now.

They can't change the license they already granted you. And moving now should not be any easier than moving in the event they do change the license in the future, with the added cost that moving may never become necessary. So, IMO, your comment on this issue is baseless fud. Developing a competing platform on tech you know to be patented is totally different than using validly licensed software.

I wonder if it couldn't be largely automated. The actual API that is exposed to end users is not that big, and I assume they can keep using Dalvik. They just need another language that compiles to Dalvik and then automatically transform the Java code to that other language. Or something like that...

Wouldn't it be great if Android would be based on a better language than Java?

> I assume they can keep using Dalvik.

The Dalvik VM is the only thing these threats are about.

> Wouldn't it be great if Android would be based on a better language than Java?

You can already write Android apps in Python, Lua, Scheme, Ruby, Scala, Clojure, Fantom, Mirah, and Javascript. This is precisely due to the fact that Dalvik is closely related to the JVM.

Except that you can't really. At least for Clojure, last time I looked it was really slow. Most dynamic languages probably make heavy use of Java reflection, which seems to be rather slow on Dalvik.

Clojure is unique among the languages I listed because it uses persistent data structures by default (being a functional language), which necessarily generates a lot of transient garbage. The reflection problems are not specific to Dalvik; they unhinted Java calls cause slowdown on the JVM as well. But it's easy to get around this with type hints.

The reviews I read pointed to reflection as the main problem of Dalvik. Are there examples of successful non-Java apps for Android yet?

I have written an app in JavaScript going the HTML5 route, but it required some Java glue code. The JavaScript engine is V8 (at least on Froyo), so it is fast.

Doesn't help - the patents aren't for Java as such, they were on the basic concept of a JVM. The same thing could apply to any other JVM or even C# and dotNet

But Oracle doesn't want a patent war with IBM and Microsoft just now. Microsoft could simply ban Oracle from running on windows, or ban any windows machine from connecting to a site using Oracle (a bit of Apple style licensing text is easy to insert)

And you don't want a patent fight with IBM - they probably have a patent on using oxygen for breathing!

Banning Oracle from Windows won't happen with the EU sueing MS to oblivion. And I think Google banning oracle "from the internet aka its search engine" would do a lot more harm. Anyway I think the reasons of Oracle are still unknown so we just have to see what happens.

The long and short of question 1 is that there will likely be a large cash transfer from google to oracle some PR spin about how googles vm is now "official" and life/litigation moves on.

I think Google will hit Oracle with a counter lawsuit. Google posses a lot of patents in area of Information Systems. Or they can cross license using patents like Map-Reduce, E.g. Google allowed ASF to use MR patent for Hadoop, however if tomorrow Oracle comes up with a proprietary solution for MapReduce, Google might not be so generous.

"it on another language say Objective C"

Maybe they could use Go for this purpose. (This would be a nice opportunity for Go.)

http://code.google.com/p/go/

My understanding is that they chose Java for being easy and mainstream. So, that said, it's easier to they choose Python over Go.

The want make a VM, compiler and a OS in Phyton. Its just not going to happen.

Go is not ready for something like this, NO CHANGE. Go as a Language and as a Platform is not ready.

This is not my area of expertise but in answer to question 1: Really hard.

1- I expect Google to support python on Android better and better. Is something they can control, hey Guido works there!. And I would love (but don't expect) they supporting c/c++ better.

4-Yes, MySQL competes with Oracle, so... they will let it die slowly. They want db systems to be expensive, not cheap.

Many of the patents that Oracle is suing over could as easily be targeted to .NET. Of course Oracle isn't dumb enough to target Microsoft (having a much deeper portfolio of superficial but deadly patents). In fact they could as easily target many other virtual machine runtimes.

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