OSCON 2012 notes

Michel Fortin michel.fortin at michelf.ca
Sun Jul 22 05:19:12 PDT 2012


On 2012-07-21 19:51:37 +0000, Nick Sabalausky 
<SeeWebsiteToContactMe at semitwist.com> said:

> On Sat, 21 Jul 2012 09:47:06 -0400
> Michel Fortin <michel.fortin at michelf.ca> wrote:
>> 
>> And also, more and more it'd require ARM support to be competitive in
>> the GUI area.
> 
> Yes. But there's an even bigger reason for ARM: Mobile devices, like
> iOS and Android. I'm not personally a fan of them, but nonetheless those
> things are HUGE (no pun intended). And yet the ONLY real language
> choices there are C++, Java and Objective-C (and Lua if you count
> "Son-of-Flash", ie Corona - which I don't count). And half of THOSE are
> out of the question if you want cross platform, which any sane developer
> should. So PERFECT fertile ground for D.
> 
> I know I keep harping on that, but it's a big issue for me since I'm
> deep into that stuff now and goddamn do I wish I could be doing
> it in D, but D's support on those devices (or just outputting C/C++)
> unfortunately just isn't mature enough ATM.

For my part, in the last year I've been building a big codebase that 
had to be C++ just because of this, with countless hours spent figuring 
out things that would have been a lot easier to do in D.

Here's the problem as I came to realize it: no single project is going 
to be enough to justify the investment required to make it happen. 
Nobody's project is by itself big enough to make D/Objective-C 
worthwhile to produce and maintain, because making it and then keeping 
it in sync with both D and Apple's Objective-C is a huge effort that'll 
in itself derail the project you were using to justify the investment. 
So D/Objective-C has to stand as a project of its own somehow.

Also, making it a cross-platform thing would require a similar 
investment for WinRT and Android (through JNI?). While it surely is 
technically possible and would sure help a lot of developers move away 
from C++, I'm not so sure such a thing will happen at all.

-- 
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.ca
http://michelf.ca/



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