Smartphones and D

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 2011-01-30 18:53, Daniel Gibson wrote:
> 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..)

Objective-C on iOS doesn't use the GC. But I think Mono does.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg