Friday, December 04, 2015

Xamarin += RoboVM - OpenSource

RoboVM Is No Longer Open Source @ InfoQ
"Following RoboVM’s acquisition by Xamarin, the company has raised the price of their offering and has closed the source code.

Both Xamarin and RoboVM have as primary activity the creation of cross-platform mobile applications, the first in C# while the latter in Java."


"By buying RoboVM, Xamarin gets access to the tremendous Java developer market, which analyst firm IDC pegs at between 5 to 7 million programmers worldwide."

"Xamarin announced recently that it's adding 60,000 users a month, with over a million registered developers. It specializes in helping enterprises build their mobile apps, which is a lucrative market as businesses move to software in droves. And Friedman now says that Xamarin has over 10,000 paying customers."



"RoboVM compiles your JVM byte code to machine code using LLVM. That's also used to compile C/C++/Objective-C on iOS. RoboVM apps are on par or exceeding the performance of Objective-C apps."



Interesting how Open Source is changing sides: Microsoft and Apple are open sourcing to get access to more developers, and small startups closing source to get access to more money...  Everybody needs something...

and the world needs universal automatic translation between programming languages, as well as between human languages. And why not between human and programming languages also! That would be a useful step to start using voice as a natural user interface...

1. "repeat" "10 times" "write" "hello world" "to" "console"
2. for(var i=1; i<=10; i++) { console.write("hello world"); }
3. (repeat 10 (write console "hello world"))

Apple's Swift += Open Source

Apple's new programming language Swift is now open source | The Verge

"Apple is kicking that final item off today by releasing a version of Swift that works on Linux. This is likely meant for Apple's enterprise partners, like IBM, who will now be able to create the consumer-facing portion of apps in Swift and have them talk to Linux servers that speak Swift as well."

Craig Federighi talks open source Swift and what’s coming in version 3.0 | Ars Technica
"Swift is being released under an Apache 2.0 license, which is incidentally the same license Microsoft used when it open-sourced a big chunk of its .NET framework last year. The project will be hosted on GitHub and will include the compiler, the LLDB debugger, the REPL command-line environment, the standard and core libraries, and code from supporting projects."


Swift.org - Download Swift

Apple Open Sources Swift @ InfoQ

IBM's Swift Response @ InfoQ

‘Unicorns’, Tech Bubble?

‘Unicorns’ And Warnings Of A Tech Bubble | On Point with Tom Ashbrook

"
The herd of tech startups valued at more than a billion dollars – so-called “unicorns,” Airbnb, Uber – and whether their bubble is about to burst.



"With the tech industry awash in cash and 100 “unicorn” start-ups now valued at $1 billion or more, Silicon Valley can’t escape the question."