Hacker News Reader

Comment by wslh | Hacker News Reader

I am happy if they add a share button like the Android one. It's a small wish but it's clear that Apple is falling behind in many areas except performance and battery life on tablets.

Relaxing App Store rules to include programming languages/VMs will give a little boost to our community too. If I want to learn Haskell I want to do it on the iPad.

View on HN

Haskell and VMs are not against the App Store rules at all, you just cannot JIT anything. The ban against non-C languages was only in place long enough to scare Adobe away.

That's not true. An app cannot run code not part of the original app package. This was a huge problem for projects like the Commodore 64 emulator.

Those rules were relaxed three years ago.

http://n4g.com/news/607824/apple-approves-manomios-c64-2-0-a...

There are many examples of programming language runtime apps, such as

Scheme: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/gambit-repl/id434534076

OCaml: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ocamlexample/id396515573

Python: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/python-3.3-for-ios/id5779112...

Codea (LUA): https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/codea/id439571171

What restricts these apps from being awesome is that they cannot download source code or accept source code pushed to them from other apps. Cut-n-paste is the only way to transfer existing code.

> they cannot download source code

The Python app can download arbitrary data with nothing more than a simple urllib call. Feed it into eval, and you're done.

The way apps can interoperate in Android is definitely an advantage over iOS for developers, but it's a security/sandbox issue not a lack of capability in the OS. iOS hugely trails Android in malware... Coincidence?

App Store allows programming languages and even VMs. It doesn't allow running externally sourced code.

But the same can be applied to copy&paste. We are not talking about rocket science....

Any malware issues on Android have more to do with differences in vetting than the intents system.

It is a security issue, but I don't think it is what is causing the Android malware issue. The Intents system on Android is a security issue because most developers don't use it smartly and end up exposing their apps to SQL injection on the internal SQLite database they use.

Actually, the fact that Android uses a virtual machine for it's code has pretty good security benefits over running native code as on iOS.

This is true in theory if not practice, but the point is that Apple blocks third party VMs (or did).

Actually, the fact that Android uses a virtual machine for it's code has pretty good security benefits over running native code as on iOS.

Howso? I'm trying to think of what a VM could guard against aside from illegal memory accesses, which of course iOS hardware (like any other modern hardware) guards against for native code.

As everything must eventually exit the VM to use hardware or certain features, you have more control over the boundary. On iOS, as you run native code, you could theoretically do direct device access in assembly and the OS has far less control over that. It is also possible to inspect the bytecode for a Java program and know with much more certainty what it's going to try and do, which instructions it will try and run, etc.

On iOS, as you run native code, you could theoretically do direct device access in assembly and the OS has far less control over that.

But the hardware access protection ensures user code doesn't access anything it's not supposed to. And its up to device drivers to manage devices and ensure that access to them by user code is done properly.

Static inspection of Java bytecode can allow you to verify the safety of some things and so do fewer checks at runtime; but to my understanding, native code has all the same protections in the end as code running in a VM.

Bullshit. Windows RT has similar app interoperability and significantly advanced share functionality when compared to iOS and yet has no 'security issue' nor 'malware'.

No users either.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com