Smartphones and D

[Andrew Wiley]

On Sun, Jan 30, 2011 at 2:30 AM, Gary Whatmore <no at spam.sp> wrote:

> 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.
>
>
Firstly, this quote may interest you:
"The Android operating system consists of 12 million lines of
code<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_lines_of_code> including
3 million lines of XML <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xml>, 2.8 million lines
of C <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_(programming_language)>, 2.1 million
lines of Java <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_(programming_language)>,
and 1.75 million lines of C++
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%2B%2B>.[20]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)#cite_note-19>
"

Yes, all that is on every Android phone, and there's enough capacity to run
pretty demanding applications on top of that. If Android can fit all of that
and run a few Dalvik Java VMs on top of that, I'd say you don't need to
worry so much about the phones being limited. Yes, you need to worry about
executable size, but it's not nearly as impossible as you seem to think.
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