even games are not really a moat for owning hardware - next Gears with its timing-sensitive reloading mechanic can just get adapted for cloud.

if cloud gaming gets another hype wave for one reason or another, this time I am pretty sure they will lock in a much bigger user base. me personally? still committed to owning my hardware, but I can totally imagine my mother playing some RTS on a GeForce Now-connected tablet and having zero complaints.

that was me comparing, please kindly read usernames next time :)

> why not just choose a language that doesn't compromise itself for those ideals in the first place?

I might want to wrap a timing-sensitive machinery into some nice UI. Rust has Tauri for that, sure, but now we are bringing npm and have zero chances of having GPU-accelerated UI without a crap-ton of fuckery which would be easier in Zig. another path for resolving that same issue is Compose Desktop + Project Panama, but then you are dealing with data marshalling, FFI boundary, and manual resource management in an environment that does not expect this.

so, here is a genius idea: why not have everything in one language? C++ already does that, much like C, but Zig does that so much better, and incremental compilation time is one of the more practical and immediate developer UX benefits it provides. Rust? good luck having shared mutable state there.

then how does Zig achieve ~90%?

> In any case, why would a better linker and faster compile times of all things achieve this supposed goal?

sub-100ms rebuild is actually more important as the project grows. when you iterate, you think differently. picking different colors or fonts or whatnot becomes much cheaper, so you are more willing to try

no. GC pauses turn any serious systems work into hell.

> Yes, and it will still only be useful [...]

this does not exclude the possibility of creation of libraries that manage everything for me within their domain of responsibility, such as dvui

this makes porting projects gradually, file by file, rather cumbersome. now I have to rewrite quite a lot of Chocolate Doom because my port was halfway there and then @cImport got gutted... or keep going with Zig 0.16.2 until it's either 100% Zig or has little enough files that upgrading won't make my build.zig file implode in lines of code

> What is going on in the world of pure IOS/Android app development?

I'll speak only for Android.

I am tired of Google breaking source compatibility with every AndroidX release and remaining on outdated IntelliJ Platform versions in Android Studio.

not too long ago, Google released AGP 9.0, which was a SHOCKWAVE for many Android projects. many compiler plugins' compatibility, including Google's own Protobuf Gradle plugin, took very long to adapt. also, Kotlin Multiplatform received so much damage that a month after release, JetBrains themselves released an AGP 9.0 migration video on YouTube.

and then we have MDC-Android (Views) v. Compose tension. MDC-Android got Material 3 and M3 Expressive components much faster than Compose, and for many you still have to be on alpha Compose Material3 releases... which are more stable than "Stable," somehow. Compose is nice, but I'd swap Material for something else ASAP or use Compose Foundation directly.

> How is AI/LLMs affecting app development?

you have more useless buttons in Android Studio. or, if you are a paying IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate user, you can have Android support in IDEA, which enables ACP agents without sacrificing proper Android support. IDEA Android plugin lags behind AGP upgrades a little, though, but it's fine.

oh, and, you can vibecode Android apps in Google AI Studio with streaming from a Google-hosted device, all without Android Studio.

> what has changed in App Development in the past 2-5 years?

2 years? a lot. 5 years? the world turned upside down! Compose got Stable release 4 years ago.

> What does a career in only app development look like nowadays?

very discouraging. everyone just prefers React "Native". I couldn't find an Android job in two years because it's nowhere to apply to in Ukraine and just recently switched to .NET. guess what? less than a few weeks passed after I updated my Djinni and now I have a few interviews on the next week.