Mobi/Robovm and Graal

[aardy1]

I have been using Graal a fair bit to make native builds of JavaFx apps on various platforms, including mobile.

Today I stumbled across Mobi/Robovm (!).

I read some of the Mobi/Robovm docs, and Mobi/Robovm looks like it is an AOT compiler like Graal. But I suspect there is more to it than that.

So I am trying to understand how Mobi/Robovm is different to Graal? This isn't meant to be a critique or start a flame war about either platform, I am just trying to understand so I can choose the appropriate tools for future work.

My main interest in Mobi/Robovm lies in using it with JavaFX and libgdx, and in natively accessing things like GPS, compass etc (I am building software for sailing).

Hopefully that is not too broad a question, and that people will take it in the constructive manner it is intended.

thx
graham

[dkimitsa]

hi,
personally had no experience with Graal. as I recall Oracle is not going to support iOS officially. but it up to date version of java that makes it best compatible.
at other hand RoboVM is mostly iOS oriented and has iOS/Cocoa API covered and support for wide range of third party libraries native to iOS. At other hand its runtime is bit outdated (e.g. Android 4.4+ level). RoboVM just allows quick jump-in for libgdx based projects as most of the cases you can quickly get your game running on iOS platform.

[aardy1]

Ok so I presume the API coverage is what the "pods" are about? Or is that something else?

I am a little confused about the Android runtime being outdated. I thought Mobi compiled down to native code ...

[dkimitsa]

mostly pod bindings for various frameworks.
Mobi compiles JAVA class files to native. But before you have to compiled java to classes . And if your code or dependencies depend on API that is not part of Runtime -- there comes troubles. But as long as you stick to libgdx mostly you are going to be ok.
(there is work to bring fresh runtime, like there is a fork with Android12 runtime)

[aardy1]

Ok I see. Thx for all the information.