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  • „Transpile“ editor to iPadOS

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Spine is a great tool. Having it for iPad would be awesome. I was wondering what software was used within Spine, like programming languages, dependencies and compilers. Maybe it is possible to transpile some code to iPadOS or Javascript/WebAssembly.
I know that there are already hopeless threads about an Ipad version, I am just opening this thread in order to find out, whether there is a route using a transpiling approach.

Transpiling is an approach where the code in a programming language A in translated to a language B so that you are able to compile on different platforms, like web browsers.

The way how the user would interact with the editor using a pen and his fingers is a different thing… (haha)

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Spine is primarily built as a desktop productivity tool, and it uses technologies that are not easily ported to iPadOS. The software is developed using libgdx, a Java-based framework, which is not directly compatible with iOS/iPadOS environments. Transpiling the existing code to work on iPadOS would be a significant challenge due to the differences in user interface design and input methods (touch vs. mouse/keyboard). Additionally, the Spine team has expressed that they do not have plans to support iOS due to the substantial effort required and their preference to focus on enhancing Spine's features for desktop platforms.

Spine is built on the JVM. In a previous life, I've actually build and sold a native compiler for Java Bytecode targeting iOS/iPad OS (RoboVM), so I'm pretty aware of what's involved.

I'm afraid there's too much tech inside Spine that doesn't easily port over to iOS, apart from the big investment in terms of resources for a very small market.

Thanks for the answer. I thought Java is famous for its „write once, run everywhere“.

I am curious, what details make it so hard to port. Even if there will never be such a port. Can you outline some points if that is ok to publish such details? I am also a developer, but my main domain are DSLs and the web.

Yeah, "write once, run everywhere" is nice marketing by Sun, now Oracle 🙂 On mobile, things are quite a bit different. Android's "Java" isn't quite Java. And on iOS, the only option is RoboVM, which also has an incomplete Java class library. RoboVM also uses the Boehm GC, which simply isn't fit for big workloads like Spine.