Smartphones and D

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Saturday 29 January 2011 21:45:33 jim_g wrote:
> 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.

gdc or LDC might be able to build for ARM. I don't know. But dmd is x86 only 
(with x86_64 on the way). So, at the moment, you're not going to be able to 
build for ARM using dmd. I suspect that gdc can do it, since it's using gcc for 
its backend, but I don't know.

There's probably a good chance that dmd will support ARM _eventually_ - as long 
as there's sufficient demand for it - but I doubt that it will any time soon. I 
expect that there are too many other things that need to be done for it to be a 
high priority at the moment.

- Jonathan M Davis