Running Erlang on Android (like running sheep on electricity)

Michael Turner leap@REDACTED
Fri Jan 15 12:56:01 CET 2010


Erlang needs something adequately Unix-like.  Erlang is a C-coded app, so
you pretty much need some approximation of the standard C library.  Does
Android deliver?

Android is Linux, but not really.  Android is a Java platform.  But not
even that, in the "write once run anywhere" sense.

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/reviews/2009/02/an-introduction-to-google-android-for-developers.ars

"Although Android is built on top of the Linux kernel, the platform has
very little in common with the conventional desktop Linux stack. In
fact, during a presentation at the Google IO conference, Google engineer
Patrick Brady stated unambiguously that Android is not Linux.

"Much of the Android userspace operates within the constraints of
Dalvik, Google's own custom Java virtual machine. Dalvik uses its own
bytecode format called Dex, and is not compatible with J2ME or other
Java runtime environments. Third-party Android applications are written
in Java using Android's official APIs and widget toolkit. The Android
SDK includes special compilation tools that will translate Java class
files into Dex bytecode and generate an installation package that can be
deployed on Android devices."

Baffled?

Call me a cynic, but have you looked at Google's P/E?  It's
ridiculously high.  Something's gotta give eventually, and I think
it'll be the numerator.  But imagine you're high up in Google, with
lots of stock options.  Of course, you want your options to vest with a
handsome profit.  But that can't happen if the P part of the P/E drops
down to something rational and un-exuberant.  So you might promote all
kinds of unlikely projects if you noticed (and how could you not?) that
any thrusty new project associated with Google made many investors
continue to think that Google might have The Next Big Thing.  They all
want to believe that anyway, of course, but spending what *seems* like
lots of money signals to those investors that their belief is almost
certainly justified.

Maybe Ericcson should come out with an Erlang over TRON over ARM, for
phones.  They could call it Ndroid, right?  When Google sued them for
that name (a legal move that would do little more than generate valuable
publicity for Ericsson), they could quickly change the name to
ARMsTRONg.  (After all, Intel *couldn't* sue them for that -- it's too
late, Intel gave up on ARM, which they never really wanted anyway, since
it just came as part of their winnings in some lawsuit.)

Why, yes, I *did* used to work in Silicon Valley until I got sick to
death of marketing/stock-manipulation/patent-infringement-claim
headgames.  How did you guess?

-michael


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