Smartphones and D

[Daniel Gibson]

Am 30.01.2011 09:30, schrieb 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.

Then it's not a smartphone, at least not a modern one.
jim_g was talking about Android phones and iphones, which are pretty 
powerful and handle garbage collected languages just fine (android uses 
java..)