Smartphones and D

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 2011-01-30 09:17, 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.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis

With modifications to dmd to allow binding to Objective-C libraries 
(currently in progress) and using gdc/ldc could probably allow to create 
iOS applications using XCode and Interface Builder.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg