[Gambas-user] Gambas for Android

[Rob Kudla]

On 04/11/2012 02:16 AM, John Spikowski wrote:
> This sounds grand but wouldn't it be prudent to get the Gambas console
> mode interpreter working on Android Linux native first? I think a GUI
> version of Gambas on Android is unrealistic at this time. Wait until
> Ubuntu release their ARM mobile Linux.

I couldn't tell which part of John Rose's post you were replying to, but
if it was about the transpiler concept, the whole idea there is that you
wouldn't need a Gambas interpreter on Android because the Gambas
bytecode would be transpiled to Java/Dalvik bytecode. But that would be
a lot of work for Benoit, before the components even come into play, and
no one else could realistically do it because it would break with any
change to the Gambas bytecode.

(I think I've been using the term "transpiler" incorrectly too, because
apparently that refers to a program that compiles source code from
language A into source code for language B, e.g. Google Web Toolkit that
takes Java source and outputs Javascript source. I don't know what the
correct term for my idea is -- perhaps it would be "dumb idea" -- but if
you google transpiler "object code", most of the top 10 hits come from
various crossposts of this mailing list thread.)

Ubuntu for Android appeals to me, and I may try it on my own tablet. But
having my clients or potential users install a second OS that runs in
parallel doesn't strike me as enough to claim I'm doing Android
development. I wouldn't base a product on it unless there were really no
other way to do it.

Rob