DConf 2019: Shepherd's Pie Edition

[Joakim]

On Tuesday, 25 December 2018 at 07:10:46 UTC, rikki cattermole 
wrote:
> On 25/12/2018 6:01 PM, Joakim wrote:
>> See my responses to Nicholas above, I don't think the Android 
>> port merits a talk. By the same standards I apply to others' 
>> talks above, I don't think my work merits a talk either. ;)
>
> A talk covering ARM and Android development in general would be 
> very well received in the context of D. If you want to be 
> convinced we could do a poll on who would want to see it (but I 
> expect quite a large number of people would be in support of).

I don't see how it could be worthwhile: nobody has ever given 
such a DConf talk about a port to a specific platform because it 
doesn't really make sense. The whole point of a port is to 
abstract away the platform, so you can simply recompile most of 
your D source for it, as H. S. Teoh has indicated he's been able 
to do with the Android app he's been developing in D recently.

The way to do that talk is to abstract multiple ports into a 
general porting guide, which is the talk Kai already gave, or 
maybe talk about the details of a port to a very obscure or 
different platform, as Igor did this year:

https://dconf.org/2018/talks/cesi.html

While it was fascinating to hear how much work he put into it, 
much more than me, my interest was squelched somewhat because he 
couldn't reveal the platform and it's likely I would never use it 
anyway (not a game programmer). I mean, who really develops for 
non-Windows, non-Posix OS platforms? I haven't since college. For 
those few who do, maybe the talk was great. But the Android port 
wasn't that obscure: it's basically a linux/ARM distro with a 
different libc, Bionic.

If you really mean "ARM and Android development in general" and 
not the details of the port, I can't claim much knowledge of 
that, as I don't have a large Android codebase that I've 
developed and deployed. Hopefully, even if I did, there would be 
nothing to say: as it should be pretty similar to writing D code 
for a desktop platform.

My phone- on whose 5.5" screen I'm viewing the text of this forum 
response as I type it out on a separate, full-sized bluetooth 
keyboard paired with it- has 6 GBs of RAM and 128 GBs of storage 
(of which I have 8 GB free right now). That's about what midrange 
desktops and laptops come with these days (though with much 
larger screens ;) ), so you can't say mobile presents much of a 
constraint in terms of hardware. I've pointed out before that I 
compile code on my phone about as fast as a Macbook Air from a 
couple years ago:

https://forum.dlang.org/thread/sqbtgmbtrorgthsplvho@forum.dlang.org

If you see some other angle on an Android talk that I'm missing, 
I'd be happy to hear it, but I don't see it. Maybe someday when I 
have a huge, successful Android app in D, I'll write about or put 
up a talk online about the architecture I used, but hopefully 
there won't be much specific to Android there. :)