
PilBox – Building Mobile Apps in PicoLisp - tankfeeder
http://www.mail-archive.com/picolisp@software-lab.de/msg07233.html
======
josteink
> An Adroid SDK project is a monster. Here, on my installation, the "PilBox/"
> folder contains more than ten thousand files!

It's sad when a clean slate project for a platform created when we should have
known better decades ago still ends up with this kind of overhead.

It perfectly matches my recollection of doing Android development too: a big
uncontrollable mess of different kinds of files whose inter-dependencies and
relations are completely opaque.

------
sxp
Another good option if you want to write Android apps in Lisp is lein-droid
[1] which allows you to use Clojure on Android. This means you can use any
standard Android API, library or SDK in your app without additional bridge
components.

The initial build & deploy times for Clojure on Android are annoying, but
using a REPL to edit your Android app dynamically is amazing.

[1] [https://github.com/clojure-android/lein-
droid](https://github.com/clojure-android/lein-droid)

~~~
nikki93
You can also use ClojureScript on React Native for both iOS and Android. Lets
you use things like reagent or re-frame that work well with persistent data
structures. It's actually super easy with Expo, which makes it so you don't
have to do any Xcode or Android Studio stuff:
[https://docs.expo.io/versions/v14.0.0/guides/using-
clojuresc...](https://docs.expo.io/versions/v14.0.0/guides/using-
clojurescript.html)

~~~
bschwindHN
I would highly recommend this! I use re-natal and it lets you target Android
and iOS (simultaneously if you really want to) with live code reloading and
native UI elements. Reagant + re-frame is a very pleasant setup for UI
development and handling data flows.

~~~
swah
You mentioned doing an app with re-natal around 3 months ago - did you
succeeded with it? Sorry for spamming here, no email on profile ;)

------
tluyben2
I have been following the dev of PicoLisp for a long time; Alexander is great.
He keeps going strong for decades. He keeps the PicoLisp platform going with
additions like this. Impressive.

------
rtpg
I'm still super shocked that Google doesn't expend more effort to get more
languages running on Android.

It feels like a no-brainer for them to want straightforward usage with, say,
Python. Is it really a performance thing?

~~~
pjmlp
No, it is a political thing.

I guess the Java bias is very strong among the ex-Sun and ex-Danger OS
developers that have joined the team since the early days.

You see this on Google IO presentations from the last couple of years, when
the audience asks about alternatives, including existing JVM languages.

~~~
hd4
With the legal issues they have had with Oracle, I'm surprised they didn't
move on from the JVM/Java much earlier.

~~~
pjmlp
Well, they started them, by not wanting to play ball.

And since I expect someone to post Jonathan Schwartz public comment commending
them, here goes what Gosling had to say about it.

"We were all really disturbed, even Jonathan just decided to put on a happy
face and tried to turn lemons into lemonade, which annoyed a lot of folks at
Sun."

[https://www.wired.com/2012/04/gosling-
slime/](https://www.wired.com/2012/04/gosling-slime/)

Companies like IBM, Atego, Aicas, MicroEJ, Excelsior, ARM among many others,
never had known issues dealing with either Sun or Oracle licenses, while
providing their own Java compilation chains and hardware specific APIs.

------
ptx
From looking at the the Java files in the linked tarball as well as the
documentation[1], it seems that PicoLisp calls Java by sending serialized
messages through pipes from a separate processes and then invokes the Java
reflection APIs.

So trying to use this to build an Android app with the native (i.e. Java)
Android UI libraries probably wouldn't work too well, right?

[1] [http://picolisp.com/wiki/?javacode](http://picolisp.com/wiki/?javacode)

------
throwaway7645
Always good to see PicoLisp on HN.

