Python faces the same problem that Clojure does on mobile: start-up times are too slow and battery use is too high.
People have made valient efforts to overcome this issue in both Python and Clojure: Kivy, Py4A and Clojure on Android, in particular. But they still can't provide reasonable performance compared to native mobile frameworks.
It's just a product on Python implementation: too much complexity and too heavyweight objects (and almost everything is an object!).
To a certain extent, the same applies to Clojure -- there is a price to be paid for abstractions and (and in the case of Clojure) immutability, and it rears its ugly head the most when trying to fit these language implementations on resource-constrained mobile platforms.
The whole freesmartphone.org middleware was initially implemented in Python and there is bunch of Python apps in distros like SHR.
Python is great for mobile when it comes to hacking on-the-fly - I actually traced down and fixed few bugs in early Openmoko while getting bored in tram etc. thanks to the most useful parts being implemented in Python. Unfortunately, on Freerunner the difference in performance was very visible - however it shouldn't be as bad on more recent hardware.
The Kivy project seems to be making progress recently. However, I believe it still has a limited scope. It has poor support for native framework features/UI.
I bought an Android 3.x tablet in rapt anticipation of using the Android Python interpreter, but what killed me was a lack of packages that I could easily deploy and use, most notably Tkinter.
Comments
Python is such a ubiquitous language, even outside of scientific computing. It seems like mobile dev is the only area where its not present.
Python faces the same problem that Clojure does on mobile: start-up times are too slow and battery use is too high.
People have made valient efforts to overcome this issue in both Python and Clojure: Kivy, Py4A and Clojure on Android, in particular. But they still can't provide reasonable performance compared to native mobile frameworks.
It's just a product on Python implementation: too much complexity and too heavyweight objects (and almost everything is an object!).
To a certain extent, the same applies to Clojure -- there is a price to be paid for abstractions and (and in the case of Clojure) immutability, and it rears its ugly head the most when trying to fit these language implementations on resource-constrained mobile platforms.
The whole freesmartphone.org middleware was initially implemented in Python and there is bunch of Python apps in distros like SHR.
Python is great for mobile when it comes to hacking on-the-fly - I actually traced down and fixed few bugs in early Openmoko while getting bored in tram etc. thanks to the most useful parts being implemented in Python. Unfortunately, on Freerunner the difference in performance was very visible - however it shouldn't be as bad on more recent hardware.
The Kivy project seems to be making progress recently. However, I believe it still has a limited scope. It has poor support for native framework features/UI.
I bought an Android 3.x tablet in rapt anticipation of using the Android Python interpreter, but what killed me was a lack of packages that I could easily deploy and use, most notably Tkinter.