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musicale

Someone should invent a mobile platform where you can just write apps in natively compiled C/C++/ObjC.

You know, kind of like the old Palm, WebOS, or iPhone platforms.

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Nokia N900 was a beautiful thing. So beautiful it had to be killed.

That's basically the Librem 5 (https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/) and to me the most exciting thing about it.

The sad part is that since mobile development has now drifted so far away from that ideal, porting existing iOS/Android applications to the Librem isn't trivial.

You could of course have an Android runtime on the Librem...

That's a good fallback for everyone's $ANDROID_APP that can't live without. But for the most part I'd be fine with not having that tire fire ported anyway, those apps are likely to be slow, suck battery and not conform at all to the native look and feel.

This is still a perfectly valid thing to do on iOS

It's technically possible to write an entire iOS app in straight C, although it's not advised: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10289890/how-to-write-io...

iOS still exists.

Yes, but iOS requires you to use Objective-C (or Swift) just like Android requires you to use Java.

I know the comment put Objective-C right next to C and C++, but it doesn't belong there. All platforms should have (at least) C interfaces, not requiring C++ or even Objective-C.

It doesn't. You can access all Objective-C features from C, it's just a bit of a pain. There is a C interface to the Objective-C runtime.

They're still Objective-C APIs. There's a C interface to the Java runtime as well.

The point is that it shouldn't be a pain to use these interfaces from C, concepts from ObjC/Java/C++ shouldn't leak into them.

That would mean either implementing your entire API twice, or adding layers of pointless indirection, for extremely little gain. It is just not reasonable.

You're assuming that people want to program applications in "platform languages" like Objective-C or Swift or Java or Kotlin. That's generally not true. They want to use their language of choice.

That's why C interfaces are the reasonable choice, you can interface with them conveniently from pretty much any language and if you want a more idiomatic "pointless layer of indirection", you can build it.

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