Smartphones and D

[Gary Whatmore]

Jonathan M Davis Wrote:

> 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.

Another point worth noting is that these phones are really limited. It doesn't make sense to run a garbage collected D in them. Mine has 96x65 pixels according to Wikipedia. It likely has few kilobytes of RAM. A simple hello world wouldn't fit in the ram. Would be much better to replace Qt for desktop users with a GUI written in D.

 - G.W.