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posted by martyb on Sunday November 23 2014, @01:09PM   Printer-friendly
from the our-inbox-is-your-inbox dept.

Inbox is a new email app based on Gmail, which appears to be mostly aimed at mobile users — with separate versions "optimized" for web, Android, and iOS. This blog post gives an overview of their development tools for the three platforms:

For iOS we developed the now open source J2ObjC cross compiler to translate our Java data model to Objective-C, and again we get a natural API on which to build our native iOS Inbox app (complete with [Reminder snooze]). The astute reader may wonder how we deal with the impedance mismatch when translating from a garbage collected language (Java) to a reference counted one (Objective-C). Generally, J2ObjC relies on Objective-C autorelease pools, so objects normally garbage-collected are instead freed when a pool drains. ...

As an old guy, I don't really like their usage of "impedance mismatch", but maybe the analogy is okay? See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impedance_mismatch

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 23 2014, @01:16PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 23 2014, @01:16PM (#119093)

    If somebody uses the term "impedance mismatch" and they aren't talking about electronics, you can be sure that they're likely a bullshitter.

    They don't know OO, they don't know how to properly use relational DBs, and they probably have a huge hard-on (an large, erect penis, for you Europeans who aren't familiar with American terminology) for design patterns.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Nerdfest on Sunday November 23 2014, @04:04PM

      by Nerdfest (80) on Sunday November 23 2014, @04:04PM (#119136)

      Yeah, I've heard they hire mostly bullshitters.
      Impedance mismatch has been borrowed (ages ago) to describe the difficulty interfacing disparate approaches like OO, vs. relational databases vs. hierarchical, etc. Design patterns are simply names given to common coding solutions that have been used for years and they people communicate their ideas quickly and clearly.
      I'll assume you're either trolling or woke up in a bad mood.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 23 2014, @06:57PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 23 2014, @06:57PM (#119165)

        As an EE I'm confused/frustrated by this usage. You (appear to) claim that it is common, but I have never heard it before. The metaphor is nowhere near apt.
        Mismatch is fine. Impedance mismatch is very specific and totally out of context.

        • (Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Sunday November 23 2014, @08:06PM

          by Nerdfest (80) on Sunday November 23 2014, @08:06PM (#119188)

          It's common enough to have a well-defined Wikipedia entry [wikipedia.org]. I have background in analogue electronics (although not an EE) and I find it quite a nice analogy. It's been around since at least the mid-nineties and I haven't heard anything better.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 23 2014, @01:50PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 23 2014, @01:50PM (#119098)

    "Out-of-band". Fuck me. It's like these English lit/sociology/psychology bullshitters spewing ridonculous nonsense about Heisenberg Uncertainty, General Relativity, and so on.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 23 2014, @02:40PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 23 2014, @02:40PM (#119109)

    Are we suppose to get all gushy about this new app?
    Cause it's built on shit?

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 23 2014, @03:34PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 23 2014, @03:34PM (#119129)

    Impedance Mismatch is a term used in Apple documents for inappropriate UI in the context of UI design. They've been using it for a while.

    • (Score: 2) by davester666 on Sunday November 23 2014, @06:47PM

      by davester666 (155) on Sunday November 23 2014, @06:47PM (#119164)

      So, you are saying that Google is copying Apple, but doing it wrong?

      • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 23 2014, @07:26PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 23 2014, @07:26PM (#119174)

        They're both abusing electrical engineering terminology that a bunch of comp sci weenies heard in college once but don't really understand at all.

  • (Score: 1) by DeKO on Sunday November 23 2014, @10:42PM

    by DeKO (3672) on Sunday November 23 2014, @10:42PM (#119227)

    Did I miss something? Reference counting is one of many ways to implement garbage collection [wikipedia.org]. Is there anything in Java's model that forbids implementing the GC through reference counting?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 24 2014, @03:46AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 24 2014, @03:46AM (#119308)

      It's sloppy language, but it is pretty common for people to use "garbage collection" to mean "tracing garbage collection", that is, some garbage collection technology that follows pointers to figure out what objects are live instead of just counting references. One major difference is that the latter is able to handle cycles (a disconnected cycle will have references even though it's garbage), so it will actually collect all garbage.

      As far as I can tell, Java does not technically require garbage collection that handles cyclic references, but in practice all JVMs that I know of do.

    • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday November 24 2014, @02:33PM

      by TheRaven (270) on Monday November 24 2014, @02:33PM (#119409) Journal
      Garbage collection typically means full garbage collection. Pure reference counting does not collect garbage cycles. There are schemes (including some in embedded JVMs) that use reference counting plus a cycle detector. These tend to be more deterministic, but don't have quite as good throughput (and can suffer from false sharing of the reference counts in concurrent environments). You can implement Java's model with reference counting, but only if your object graphs are acyclic or if you add some other cycle detector. Now, Objective-C does allow you to override the method that's called when an object's reference count is decremented (although doing so will make you hit the slow path on modern Objective-C implementations), so you could connect a cycle detector there - I've actually done this, although I never polished it enough that I'd recommend using it in production.
      --
      sudo mod me up
  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by monster on Monday November 24 2014, @04:47PM

    by monster (1260) on Monday November 24 2014, @04:47PM (#119457) Journal

    First make gmail work, damnit!. I don't care if G thinks some of the email I receive is spam, but at least let me download it anyway. Having to go to webmail interface just to unflag them in order to later be able to download is moronic.