Smartphones and D

[Andrew Wiley]

On Sun, Jan 30, 2011 at 2:05 AM, Gary Whatmore <no at spam.sp> 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).
>
>
The trick is that in the smartphone market, once you get a SDK working in a
certain language, you're done. There simply aren't the legacy issues you see
with other applications.
Look at the iPhone. Nobody really cared about Objective C (unless they were
Mac application developers, but that was mainly a niche market) until iPhone
mobile applications came around and made it important.
Android did something similar because JavaME never really took off, and
suddenly mobile Java was important. That's not a new language, but it's a
market that never really existed before, and Android pushed Java into it by
developing the Dalvik JVM and a reasonable SDK and pushing them both to
developers. There was a Java SDK, so everyone started using Java.
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