[Openmcl-devel] Mac App store: will CCL apps fly?

[Ron Garret]

On Oct 22, 2010, at 10:24 AM, Gary Byers wrote:

> there's no reason to think that the acceptance process will be anything
> other than arbitrary.)

Exactly.  The simple fact of the matter is that Apple does not care about its developers.  It has never cared about its developers.  It doesn't need to.  It cares about its retail customers.  It serves the needs of its retail customers.  By doing that it creates a market in which enough developers are willing to put up with Apple's shit to produce more than enough product to keep the app store well stocked.

Besides, why would you even *want* to develop a retail app in CCL?  The leverage CCL gives you over ObjC is virtually useless in the retail app world.  What makes CCL cool is that you have a debugger, a compiler available at run time, the MOP, macros... what would you do with those things in a retail app?

I'm focusing my energy on the server, and in particular, on the cloud.  Notwithstanding that it's trendy, I think that the cloud will turn out to be the Next Big Thing.  The fact that you can now cons up a server on demand in a matter of minutes (which will eventually be seconds) is a MAJOR change in the computing landscape.  Having real threads running on real cores, sometimes separated by real networks and sometimes not, changes EVERYTHING.  Figuring out how to write software for this new computing model is a really hard problem that hasn't been solved yet.  Manually wrangling individual vm's is the 2010 equivalent of malloc and free.  CCL is very well positioned to be the foundation of a platform that takes over the cloud computing world.  But it won't happen if too much brain power gets spent trying to figure out how to sneak some parentheses past the neanderthals guarding the gates of the app store.

rg