Microsoft now giving away VS 2013

[Paulo Pinto via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 14 November 2014 at 22:35:30 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> 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.

Agreed, but Android makes those hurdles worse because the team 
doesn't believe in providing proper access to the NDK, whereas 
Objective-C++ and C++/CX exist to ease the life of C++ developers 
in iOS and WP, instead of JNI pain.




--
Paulo