Porting from iPhone to Windows Mobile?

I found this article a couple of days back on the MSDN site - Porting the Amplitude Application from the iPhone to a Windows Mobile Device – a Case Study.

The article talks us through porting an iPhone app to Windows Mobile. This is a good idea of course - but the article decided to use C# as the language in which to completely rewrite the app for Windows mobile! This got me wondering why anybody would want to use anything other than C++ for writing applications (as much as I really like C# as a language), excepting of course those platforms where you have no choice.

The big thing about the iPhone - for me! - is that one of Apple's several great decisions was to adopt Cocoa as their platform. This means that apps are written in Objective-C ... and, if you want, you can use Objective-C++ as well. This means that all of your app code can be written in platform-neutral C++ ... with only the UI-specific code [which is based around the Cocoa Touch framework] being in Objective-C. This way, all of your non-UI code should be easy to port to any other platform that supports C++. Note: this approach assumes that you isolate and minimise your use of low-level Cocoa elements such as NSString as much as possible! This is easy to do if you use things like your own String adaptor classes, which wrap-up this platform specific stuff in a platform-neutral manner.

The nice thing about Windows Mobile is that all your code can be written in C++. So... why would you want to use a completely different language - C# in this case - as your language? Why not instead keep as much of your code as cross-platform as possible, and use C++, which is natively supported for Windows Mobile? Then you have to do much less work to port and maintain your application.

Oh well.

While doing some Android consultancy work recently, it was strange to reflect that all of the code had to be written in Java. I've got nothing against Java per se, it is just the annoying thought that all the code I wrote could not get re-used on other platforms. I can but hope that Android's NDK eventually matures to the point where we can write write most of our graphics code in C++.

As for Symbian - I won't look at that again until they base their development on a standard version of C++ with STL template support and Posix threads ... :)