Microsoft now giving away VS 2013

[Joakim via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 14 November 2014 at 19:51:02 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
> On Friday, 14 November 2014 at 18:35:56 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> I don't know, I think D really has a chance to do well on 
>> mobile, but have other alternative languages, ie not 
>> C/C++/java, done _that_ well on Android?  I know the Rust guys 
>> are now working on it, but while languages like FreePascal are 
>> on there, I have not heard of any big success story.
>>...
>
>
> Native development in Android is a world of pain, given 
> Android's team stance on the NDK and poor tooling support.
>
> You just have a tiny subset of APIs, the ones important for 
> game development, i.e. OpenGL, in memory framebuffers, sound, 
> hardware sensors and partial POSIX.
>
> For everything else either you go JNI or have to bring third 
> party dependencies that increase the apk size.
>
> It is ridiculous to the point there isn't access to the 
> SQLLite, SKIA and other C and C++ libraries from Android. One 
> is forced to integrate an own version.
>
> Or Android Studio that still doesn't have a public roadmap 
> about C and C++ support parity to Eclipse ADT/CDT.
>
> So NDK is only worthwhile for gaming or business code with the 
> UI written in Java.
>
> Xamarin and Phonegap are the only success stories in the 
> traditional app market.
>
> One has teams of developers creating platform wrappers and the 
> other just uses the browser via the web view, thus easier 
> platform integration.
>
> I was playing around with Qt and gave up, as only the upcoming 
> 5.4 will have UI controls with support for Android.

If you're not going to use the platform language, whether Java or 
Obj-C, you have to expect some hurdles, especially if you're 
going to try to shoehorn in a new language.  D will have to work 
into those app niches you mentioned first, but as stuff like Qt 
becomes more viable on Android, official platform support may not 
matter as much.