Smartphones and D

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Gary Whatmore" <no at spam.sp> wrote in message 
news:ii37k2$2pr3$1 at digitalmars.com...
> 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.
>

With the GC stripped out (and safety checks in place to prevent accidential 
GC allocation), D would make a far better alternative to C/C++ for small 
platforms that can't handle a GC.