Where will D sit in the web service space?

[via Digitalmars-d]

On Saturday, 25 July 2015 at 03:44:23 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> No, Swift is already general-purpose because it isn't highly 
> optimized for a single purpose or feature and it's a fairly 
> low-level native language which could be used to write 
> everything from hardware drivers to webapps.

Hardware drivers?

>  In fact, I now see that Apple announced that they will be 
> contributing a linux port when they open-source it later this 
> year, so it won't even be tied to Apple's platform soon.

GNUStep has existed for decades. And gone nowhere.

> As for Apple's "subconscious gratifications," considering I 
> bought my first and last Apple product, a Powerbook G4, a 
> decade ago and would never buy any of their products since, 
> because of their crazy patent stance, that certainly doesn't 
> describe me.  Ola brought up Swift as some sort of exception to 
> the "general-purpose native languages on mobile" trend and I'm 
> simply pointing out that's not true.

http://www.primatelabs.com/blog/2014/12/swift-performance/

Swift is 24x slower than C++ for FFT…

Standard apps on Android, iOS and in browsers rely heavily upon 
the builtin rendering/animation engines of their platforms 
(written in C/C++). The bottleneck for Javascript apps on mobile 
is the animation engine and emulating the native GUI. For the 
vast majority of apps Javascript itself performs well enough.

For many mobile apps 80% of the code is GUI code. That means you 
pay a high price for not using the default language and TOOLING 
for the platform. As I've pointed out cross platform GUI is no 
longer a realistic option since the Apple/Google have 
differentiated their GUIs on purpose in order to make it harder.

 From a performance perspective you could probably do most mobile 
apps in Javascript/V8 with no noticeable impact.

Btw, Dart has picked up the null-related-operators from Swift. It 
also has async syntax sugar over Futures. It might eventually be 
positioned as a mobile language for Android, through Sky SDK and 
Material Design widgets.