D runs on watchOS! and on Android Wear too!

[Laeeth Isharc via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Monday, 28 December 2015 at 01:17:15 UTC, Dan Olson wrote:
> A little progress report. More to come later when I get 
> something pushed to github.
>
> I bought a returned Apple Watch yesterday at discount for 
> $223.99 US and tried to see how much of D would work on it 
> using my iOS fork of LDC. There were a few bumps, like dealing 
> with embedded bitcode (a watchOS requirement). After 4-hours of 
> baby steps, little D programs with incremental druntime 
> support, I was able to download a huge watch app extension with 
> all druntime and phobos unittests and run most of them 
> alphabetically. Everything zipped along fine, only a std.math 
> error, then mysteriously a exit after running std.parallelism 
> test a long time. It was late for me so decided that was enough 
> progress.
>
> This means all of druntime worked and probably most of phobos.
>
> The Apple Watch uses a new chip with armv7k, a different ABI, 
> and different exception handling than iOS, so kinda surprised 
> it worked as well as it did.  Of course much thanks goes to 
> LLVM with recently added watchOS, tvOS support, and all the LDC 
> contributors that have kept master building with the latest 3.8 
> LLVM.

Fantastic news, Dan.

I can confirm that D also runs on Android Wear (Huawei watch) and 
passes all unit tests.  Forgive the slight hijack, but I mention 
this here as people might see this thread and not the obscure one 
where I reported this previously.

Somebody should do a blog post about this (and how to get it to 
work step by step - it's easy when you know how, but the set of 
people that don't and would like to but will get stuck is quite 
large).

I might have a commercial use for this in coming months (both on 
Android and watchOS).  Since it's an internal application the 
rough edges are of less concern to me than if one expects 
100,000+ users.

Wrappers for everything would help a lot (and then some 
tutorials) - I guess the Apple stuff is under way.  Joakim has a 
binding for JNI, but would be nice to wrap so easier to use (and 
then build Android SDK  wrappers on top of that.  I saw this 
project here, but haven't yet tried:

https://github.com/Monnoroch/DJni

I guess the spirit of what Xamarin do with their stuff might be a 
model.

Could this be a useful Google Summer of Code Project?  Or is it 
too dull for the kinds of people that might be interested.