Smartphones and D

Jonathan M Davis jmdavisProg at gmx.com
Sun Jan 30 00:17:44 PST 2011


On Sunday 30 January 2011 00:05:59 Gary Whatmore wrote:
> jim_g Wrote:
> > What I tried to say is, in my opinion, a language with only a half or a
> > quarter of D's improvements over C++ would be more successful on
> > smartphone/tablet platforms than yet another x86 oriented language, no
> > matter how good. The killer feature is to be in the right place and the
> > right time.
> 
> That's clearly not true. D is a revolutionary new language. It's supposed
> to replace most of the mainstream language including C/C++, C#, Objective
> C, and Java. The scripting capabilities also make D a good competitor for
> the notorious Python, leading to several orders of magnitude better
> performance than slow VM languages give. We have a Python fan (bearphile)
> in this mailing list who has several times shown how D outperforms Python
> (which probably is the fastest scripting language).
> 
> D's main focus currently is 32-bit x86 servers and desktop applications.
> This is where the big market has traditionally been. Not everyone has
> 64-bit hardware and I have my doubts about the size of the smartphone
> markets. The modern iterators, streams, and XML processing in Phobos 2
> help in these a lot. D is also fully open source which means it's a
> perfect replacement for open source frameworks (Qt).

I do think that it would be a definite boon to be able to create D programs for 
smart phones, but the overall focus of D development has been on the language 
itself and the standard libraries, not on making it work on additional 
platforms. That's a backend issue. It will likely be addressed at some point, 
but it's not a priority. There's just too much else to do.

Not to mention, until some of the D GUI toolkits - such as QtD - are more 
mature, I'm not sure how feasible it would be to create smart phone applications 
anyway. GUI development is not one of D's strong suits at this point. It's being 
addressed, but it takes time.

- Jonathan M Davis


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