So, something I mentioned in the brainstormy thing is actually relatively serious. Dmitry once confided - not sure how secretly but I am a blabbermouth - that it would take a low six-figure sum to get Excelsior to produce a headless port of their JET compiler for ARM CPUs without the JIT part.

Anyone behind the curve on the significance of this:-

1. iOS has no Java of any kind that really merits the description "Java". Anything you might reasonably cobble together, should you still have enough hair and SAN, will be slow and shit. And furthermore Apple won't let anything on their device that can execute scripts or dynamic code in any way other than the built-in Javascript engine. Even Mono has its JIT disabled so you can run it on iOS.

2. Excelsior JET produces seriously blisteringly fast code. 8 years ago when I first made Alien Flux with it, not only did I get the entire game into a 5MB download, it started up in the blink of an eye versus. about 20 seconds for ordinary Java, and ran butter-smooth on ancient creaky hardware. 8 years ago this was stuff like 600MHz Pentium 2s with Geforce 2 GPUs.

3. Objective-C, the programming language of iOS, is universally loathed, on account of its awful shitness. We all know that Java is a Very Nice Way To Code Indeed, and it'd be just lovely to be able to code for iOS in Java without all the hair-pulling etc. that C++ generally produces or the self-loathing and strange masturbatory habits that Objective C will eventually induce in you.

4. We only need Headless java as AWT is bugger all use on iOS.

5. LWJGL, er, already happens to be ported to OpenGL-ES / ARM...

So - I was wondering about whether we should get together a Kickstarter project to fund this and dump the money on Excelsior's doorstep. I'd put $10k in straight up.

Cas

I'd put in $10.

Also, I actually really like Objective-C now that I have worked with it for 2 years. It's got a nice kind of elegance. There are some things that are stupid about it (nil ignoring everything, for example) but overall it's quite good.

Yeh, $500k (half of it up front)

IMO you're knocking on the wrong door, JGO just doesn't have the man power to raise that sort of money from the bottom up, at best you'd be luck to make $5,000.00 (excluding your contribution) but a 100 times that? highly unlikely.

It'd be best if you try approach someone with deeper pockets and a vested interest in Java, like Markus who could easily put down $100k (about a days worth of Minecraft sales), or even cut some sort of deal with them (Mojang) like promising them your next first born (game). Other potential targets would include Jagex and Three Rings, not many others have that sort of muscle.

Another option is for you (or Excelsior) to get some sort of venture capital or other business investor to raise/provide that sort of money.

The donation idea IMO could only work if there was a large enough audience available like that of the Humble Indie Bundle, if something like that could be arranged, I'm sure we could pull a few strings (possibly even from some LWJGL connections) and get a crack commando line up of games (at least better than the frozenbyte HIB).

However do keep in mind if its going to be community funded like that, then the community is going to expect something back, like the product being open source or free licences for us or something. Its not exactly clear if that's what Excelsior had in mind or if its just so they can create a proprietary version that they can sell on.

Noone with rich uncles around here then? 

Here is how I am going to deal with the problem.  My AllBinary Platform support J2ME, Android, and J2SE.  As such the direct course for me is HTML5 and ActionScript to get my stuff on IOS.

To bad phoneme (Suns open implementation of J2ME) is GPL otherwise I would just use that.  Yes, I know it is not what your looking to do.

http://oss.readytalk.com/avian/index.html
http://oss.readytalk.com/gitweb?p=avian.git;a=shortlog;h=refs/heads/ios
Keep it free!

Anybody really tried GCJ for this?

Does that XMLVM thing that converts Java to Objective C work very good?

How much of post converting performance tweaking do you need to do? if any?


I know in the google tech talk that during the discussion of it, it does add some bloat, but some of it gets optimized away. I haven't looked at it to see how much messy the Objective C code is but it was what I was hoping to try out one of these days.

My question for cas is: considering the years you've been lamenting this, why haven't you moved to c++ yet?  There are a lot of developers making games and money on ios and android with the same code base using g++, sdl, and opengl es.  It's possible to use a very java like subset of c++, then you just have be careful with memory allocation.  This is not meant to be snarky, I really am curious.

While I am not cas I would like to say that many c++ games use lua.  So, for me I just chose Java instead of Lua.  Not that Lua is bad.  C/C++ is behind almost all Java implementations anyways.  So, I just treat it is as a scripting vm language.  So you can choose C/C++ without developing much in it.  So you really can't escape ASM -> C/C++ -> Java/Lua anyways.  Unless you just love wasting time with ASM and C/C++ all the time.  Java and Lua are just to good.

The minute you write a JVM that runs actual Java classes on iOS, Apple will block it at the AppStore level - they killed Adobe and they'd kill Java. Put as much money as you want into building a VM - wasted time. Better bet would be improve the automated conversion approaches.

Kev

You're missing the point. The automated conversions are not Java programs, they are native iOS programs. Adobe Flash got killed because Apple does not want a platform-in-the-middle, which is a category JVM also falls under.

In fact Adobe themselves are adding iOS as a compile target for applications built with their upcoming Flash development suites.

Pahahaha good luck with that...

It's not a JVM then, it's a Java native compiler?

All the examples I can see on the Avian website are about using it as a JVM, i.e. embedding it in your application and packaging your JARs along with it. If thats the case, Apple will reject it based on it being a "scripting" language (their words).

As to whether it's a native application or not (and from what I can see, it's not), on every submission Apple scan the symbols in the object files. There are particular names they're looking for. I doubt Avian is on their scope yet but if once it is, it's blocked for everyone - and anyone using it already will get pulled. I've tried a few different routes so far and they get hit in similar ways.

Trying to trick Apple into letting your application onto the AppStore isn't a way to run a business. XMLVM have had the thumbs up from Apple so far (not that they couldn't change their mind in a second).

With respect to GCJ, I tried for a few days on the Mac and couldn't get anything to actually target ARM correctly. I'm sure it's possible I just haven't see it yet.

Kev

Thats entirely selective - Adobe products still being prevented under this "clause". Last I checked, Apple were not fans of Java.

Kev