Smartphones and D

[jim_g]

Hello 

I'm currently doing business with 4 commercial applications on Android 2.1+ and iPhone 3GS+. One of the current problems is that we're facing the limits of performance especially when developing Java which is interpreted on the oldest hardware. Thanks to reddit I read about D recently and it seems to hit the head of the nail squarely. I've used to think that more performance means less "power" in the language when thinking in ways of simplicity (easy to read), high level language features (nameless functions) and so on. BUT D has it all in a nice package and solves all these issues.

My question is, how well does D support ARMv6 and ARMv7? I'd like to make full use of auto-vectorization and inlining when doing foreach loops, iterators with inline predicates, and array operations. Our problem with C on ARM is that many compilers are still far from good. We wouldn't want to buy a commercial compiler unless it's really worth its salt. Reading this newsgroup revealed that D uses some kind of thing called 'lowerings' for optimizing high level features. Does this avoid all these complex bugs?

Another question is, does D have any tutorials for building stuff on ARM? Any Android/iOS bindings anywhere? Has anyone done any Android/iPhone development in D? Would you recommend D instead of C/C++ for these platforms? If not, how long will it take before D beats C/C++ on these platforms? How I see it is there's not much time left to earn big money on these. Some popular applications already become (adware) free because of piracy and competition.

Cheers

 = jim =