OSCON 2012 notes

[Nick Sabalausky]

On Sun, 22 Jul 2012 08:19:12 -0400
Michel Fortin <michel.fortin at michelf.ca> wrote:

> 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.
> 

FWIW, Marmalade ( www.madewithmarmalade.com ) has already done the
legwork to allow crossplatform natively-compiled C++ code that works on
iOS, Android and a bunch of other less "hip" stuff like Bada, WebOS,
Symbian, and some version of mobile windows (6, IIRC). I'm sure
they'll be doing WinRT at some point if not already working on it. They
do abstract away the underlying OS calls (including usage of
Objective-C), although they also provide a (somewhat roundabout) way to
access them directly if you need. Unfortunately, it's not open-source
and it's somewhat pricey, but point is, C++ across all those platforms
does at least exist.

Also, on the Android, you don't need to deal with the JVM (or whatever
Google's version of it is called). Apparently that used to
be the case, but now you can just use straight C++, even without third
party tools like Marmalade. There's a lot of about Google and Android I
don't like, but as usual: At least it's not *quite* as shitty as dealing
with Apple's inevitably putrid offering.