What are we going to do about mobile?

[Radu via Digitalmars-d]

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

I think mobile would be nice, but there needs to be a good full 
stack (game lib, UI lib, maybe both) packaged with the compiler 
and runtime in order to get people attention.

What I see as something that can be targeted from day one is IoT, 
industrial controllers, cloud and other embedded/backend 
platforms (I'm basically agreeing with aberba's post).

I'm currently trying the armv5 platform, as you pointed out. The 
possibilities are far more appealing for me to use the D stack on 
Linux/Arm(Mips) as everything I know in the industrial space uses 
this combination.

Being able to create software with a nicer language using nicer 
libraries would be the "killer app" for an entire industry.

I think there is great potential and the proverbial 
low-hanging-fruit here for getting stuff rolling.

Would be great if we could persuade the D foundation to sponsor 
some Linux ARM/Mips CI infrastructure, I know I would pitch in my 
2 cents for the cause.
This infrastructure could be used by LDC and GDC and be extended 
in the future.