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Comment by franzus | Hacker News Reader

One thing all those "let's build our app on top of 1000 layers so we can use our $favourite language"-people tend to forget is that mobile software runs on mobile devices. Which have one remarkable property: they are energy constrained. So you better write some fast, native code or your users will have trouble keeping their devices alive for one day.

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I remember well the assembly language crowd making the same argument back in the eighties. Processors got faster and machines shipped with more RAM. The tipping point was reached and all of a sudden no one was writing entire programs that way.

While you wait for the tipping point, I'll be over here shipping.

Shipping slow, bloated software using a framework that is a second class citizen on any platform you decide to compile to.

That doesn't matter. What matters is whether your users care or not. We're all app perfections here, as well we should be, but plenty of people are happy with "good enough".

I write apps native, in the given platform's blessed language and framework.

That is fine. We will eat your lunch on version two.

Then hire you on a great salary because great programmers are hard to find.

I think RubyMotion proves that alternative languages don't need to come at a cost to performance. It's tougher to write a custom compiler like RM uses, but the end result is identical performance to normal Objective-C. "Just" write a similar compiler for Android/Dalvik and you're there ;)

Just watched the video on RubyMotion. Is this really saving much time over Objective-C? I'm saving a few lines of code, but now I have to keep compiling from Ruby to Obj-C, and get none of the benefits of XCode.

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