Google has quietly launched a new iOS app today called Ivy that it describes as an experimental big number calculator.
The minimalistic UI offers users arbitrary floating point formatting, big number logarithm, trigonometric functions, and exact ration arithmetic, according to the app’s release notes. Google says the app “uses exact rational arithmetic so it can handle arbitrary precision. Values may be input as integers, rationals, or floating point values.”
Google has yet to make an official announcement for the new app that went live on the App Store earlier today. Unlike most of its other iOS apps, Google lists “The Go Authors” as a seller on the app, in addition to Google Inc, which appears to be in reference to The Go Project, an open source programming language developed by teams at Google and other contributors. It seems possible the Ivy app was developed as a companion tool for the project. Here’s a description of The Go Project from its website:
Go is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel type system enables flexible and modular program construction. Go compiles quickly to machine code yet has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. It’s a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language.
The free app is available on the App Store now for iPhone and iPad.
Update: Readers have noted that the new Ivy app is actually written using the Go programming language:
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Even Google develops first for Apple iOS. LOL
maybe it’s just a port of https://github.com/robpike/ivy
Ivy is a sample code for the Go programming language (see: https://github.com/robpike/ivy )
Since iOS is a closed OS you can’t build and run a complied code sample yourself. You’ll need to publish the binary to the appstore 1st…. So the authors did that for you.
Reason: Apple doesn’t allow dynamic generation of code by programs. ie programs that create programs aren’t allowed on iOS (see section 3.3.2 of iOS developer rules).
On Android, anyone can build and run their own code. Just load a Go IDE like this one https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nullient.angoide and then compile and run Ivy on it.
Shhhh!!! Don’t try to make sense in here. The sheeps will blow up!
In fact, Xcode 7 lets you run code on your iOS device yourself without paying any fee.
I know that for some problems you need this. Can some readers throw light on some of those problems.
For some reason sel and fill don’t seem to work on iOS?