What are we going to do about mobile?

[Joakim via Digitalmars-d]

I have been saying for some time now that mobile is going to go 
after the desktop next 
(http://forum.dlang.org/thread/rionbqmtrwyenmhmmggx@forum.dlang.org), Samsung just announced it, for a flagship device that will ship tens of millions:

http://www.theverge.com/2017/3/29/15104600/samsung-dex-galaxy-s8-dock-announced-price-release-date
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QA31CaL_42A

That means this tidal wave of mobile swamping PCs is only going 
to get worse:

https://twitter.com/lukew/status/842397687420923904

D is currently built and optimized for that dying PC platform.  
There are only two devs working on mobile, Dan and me, I don't 
think anybody on the core team has even tried our work.

Even Microsoft has announced that they're taking another shot at 
ARM, ie Windows is coming to ARM again, this time with x86 
emulation for old Win32 apps:

http://www.theverge.com/2016/12/7/13866936/microsoft-windows-10-arm-desktop-apps-support-qualcomm

I would even go so far as to say it may be worthwhile to develop 
an ARM backend for dmd.

What needs to be done?  Same as anything else, we need people to 
try it out and pitch in, like this guy who's now trying ldc out 
on an embedded device with an old ARMv5 core:

https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/issues/2058

I provide Android releases of ldc here:

https://github.com/joakim-noah/android/releases

We've been fixing Android/ARM regressions in the latest D 
releases here:

https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/issues/2024

More than anything else, we need the community to try building 
mobile libraries and apps, because compiler support is largely 
done.  We need to integrate mobile into our plans, rather than it 
just being a sideline.

There are two main possibilities for D usage on mobile right now:

- D libraries for faster code than the native languages
- full GUI apps written in D, likely cross-platform

The latter may seem far-fetched given D has not done that well in 
desktop GUI apps, but mobile is still a new market and D could do 
well.  D is uniquely well-suited to mobile, because it's nicer 
than Java or Obj-C while more efficient than the former, and it 
could make it easier to go cross-platform.

Vadim has done some nice work building DLangUI on Android, 
including a Tetris app that I spent half an hour playing on my 
phone:

http://forum.dlang.org/thread/cdekkumjynhqoxvmgjze@forum.dlang.org

I realize D is never going to have a polished devkit for mobile 
unless a company steps up and charges for that work.  But we can 
do a lot better than the complacency from the community we have 
now.