I was wondering why smartphone/mobile device OSs are not written to allow dynamic languages as the language of choice?  iPhone uses Objective-C, Google Android uses Java, Windows Mobile uses any manner of .NET language.
What would be the reasoning behind a mobile OS being written in Python, Ruby, or any other dynamic language?  I understand that at a low level they would not cut it but C or C++ would be fine for that and Python, for example, could be the layer on top to interact with it.  I mean, there is Jython or CPython.
I was just wondering why we do not see more dynamic language support in today's mobile OS's.
There is a linux distribution for OpenMoko Freerunner called SHR. Most of its settings and framework code is written in python and... well, it isn't very fast. It is bearable, but it was planned from the beginning to rewrite it in Vala.
On the other side, my few smallish apps work fast enough (with the only drawback having big startup time) to consider python to develop user applications.
For the record: Freerunner has ARM-something 400MHz and 128MB of RAM. I guess that once mobile devices cross 1GHz, languages like Python will be fast enough for middle-level stuff too (the low-level being the kernel).
Python/Ruby as mobile OS