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liquid.silver
28-12-2008, 03:24 AM
I was thinking about cross platform programming and the various positive points of using such languages/frameworks. How awesome would it be if your one piece of code could be compiled to run on windows, linux, mac, cell phones, iphones, android, playstation, xbox, wii... etc with the only thing you need to do is define key bindings and press compile for each platform?

Now i know there are many technical difficulties with this idea and it will almost never be realised, but in a perfect world, i would only be developing for it. And in my open source world, i'd probably even buy it, as long as my target market didn't have to.

So this brings me to java. Java can run on a huge number of platforms and may very well be the answer, but i've always had a dislike of java. I can't really give any concrete proof, and i even do development in java at work, but i still don't really like it. Now this is not a reason that java can't the the ultra portable language or all time, but it isn't. To support a number of different platforms, like pc and mobile, java just won't work, you still need to maintain a number of different version of the same code, but that is partially due to the wildly different natures of these platforms.

And that announces the arrival of my final question. Is a truly portable language/framework possible and/or does something close already exist? Any other thoughts are also welcome.

edg3
28-12-2008, 07:52 AM
Well as far as cross platform development goes, I havent yet taken the plunge yet, I normally choose my platform and go from there.

Also I dont believe that we will see a true cross platform solution, although if you think about it you could achieve it with c based languages couldnt you? In many cases its just a change in framework/libraries to work with a different platform. It will be a big project if anyone wants to make a truly cross platform solution