What are we going to do about mobile?

[aberba via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 6 April 2017 at 05:24:07 UTC, Joakim wrote:

> That means this tidal wave of mobile swamping PCs is only going 
> to get worse:
That remains to be seen.

> 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
ARM is *rising*, that's true. But there is no factual evidence in 
their decision (that you seem to know) backing your point. 
Microsoft, Apple, Google, ... all invest in projects they end up 
abandoning.

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

> 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.
IoT, Cloud

> 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:
Any unpolished GUI toolkit (even when polished) will not sell on 
android-iOS except for Games with custom drawn elements. C++ is 
in that same position. Google is busy pushing Java, Apple is busy 
pushing Swift. DlangUI could work but will not land you a big 
share in usage.
>

> 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.

With the *rising* market for IoT and Cloud, the effort invested 
in ARM should be geared towards these areas with much potential. 
Canonical just gave up their Ubuntu Touch (Mobile OS) and Unity 8 
DE to invest their resources in Cloud and IoT. Fighting for 
mobile apps market (except for WebGL/OpenGL/Vulkan games), which 
big corporates like Microsoft are also in fighting but losing 
doesn't seem like a good idea.

IoT and Cloud entails ML, AI, NLP, embedded programming, bots, 
microservices, containerization, robotics... which mir, vibe.d, 
mqtt, and its projects are implementing some in bits.

Thats what you can say has potential cus they are actually 
*rising*