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Dropbox loses engineering competence in non-managed code, rationalizes their problems as "the hidden costs of code sharing".https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2019/08/the-not-so-hidden-cost-of-sharing-code-between-ios-and-android/ …
This is another example of the trends I highlighted in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk … ... (a) Avoiding a way of programming, resulting in the loss of capability to do that thing. (b) Explaining away the loss of capability as "we are choosing not to do X, because Y is obviously better".
(c) Having to rewrite entire programs in different programming languages, just because the platform changed, a.k.a. regressing back to the 1950s in terms of software portability.
One way to read the article: "When we had a small team of good people, things worked. Then we got a big team, the good people left, and those here now are largely incompetent." This seems like a common story.
Yep. The reason why they still exist is they struck it rich in the Lucky Product market, so it doesn’t matter very much how efficient they are. ... Until later, when it will.
IIRC, Dropbox are one of the largest corporate users of Rust. I don't think that's a fair description of that article.
Did you read the article? They aren't talking about Rust at all.
I did: they are moving from a shared code base in C++ to native apps in platform-native languages. My point was that Dropbox do use a lot of non-managed code in other areas, so if they aren't using it here, there is probably a better reason than fear of non managed code.
When they say “mobile developers don’t like C++” all I hear is “none of the C++ experts are 22 years old.”
It sounds to me that Dropbox is making a rational choice that was forced by many irrational actors: Google and Apple not being good stewards of their platforms, and magpie employees. Though I do find "we couldn't hire anyone" to implicitly mean "at the price we want."
the second argument of malloc is dollars
yeah all this article said is they lost their good c++ programmers and couldn't find any replacements
I’m not really surprised. The attitude around c++ and c from my peers (all under 30) is filled with fear and ignorance. Manual memory management is looked down upon and if you’re not using a billion dependencies, you’re not doing it right.
there's a non trivial cost associated with interfacing to/from cross platform code, depending on the concrete project it might not be worth it, especially when one wants to have UI with all the bells and (platform-dependent) whistles
also Swift isn't managed
Do you think your characterization of software has any relation to Richard Feynman's characterization of science in this famous speech "cargo cult science"? http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm …
I see some similarities (both are contrarian and radical criticisms), but some key differences: Feynman's cargo cult science does not work. However, modern "bad" software does work, just does it worse than what's possible.
This is amazing. They're literally laying down how incompetent they've become as a company publicly. Thanks for sharing!
To be fair, Dropbox is an inherently OS integrated app. It'd act as a filesystem extension, which has to be updated as OSes change. In a market with yearly breaking ios&android changes, sharing a significant amount of code between platforms sounds like a bad idea from the start.
Finally someone tried to explain it. I've to explain almost to every non tech person in management why I prefer native development for mobile apps instead of using cross platform tools as they always argue about cost and time of development.
Next time I will just share this link. thank you dropbox for making my life easier. 
Sharing a link to a very specific technical solution to a very specific subset of technical and management problems as your go to "default explanation for why I prefer native" doesn't seem like a particularly useful thing to do.
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