What are we going to do about mobile?

[Marco Leise via Digitalmars-d]

Am Thu, 06 Apr 2017 05:24:07 +0000
schrieb Joakim <dlang at joakim.fea.st>:

> D is currently built and optimized for that dying PC platform.

As long as the world still needs headless machines running
web sites, simulations, cloud services, ...;
as long as we still need to edit office documents, run
multimedia software to edit photos and video, play AAA video
games the "PC master race" way;
I'm confident that we have a way to go until all the
notebooks, PCs and Macs disappear. :)

I'd say we just have /more/ fully capable computers around us
nowadays. I'd probably roughly split it into
- web/cloud server machines, often running VMs
- scientific computation clusters
- desktops (including notebooks)
- smart phones
- embedded devices running Linux/Android (TVs, receivers,
  refrigerators, photo boxes, etc...)

When targeting smart phones you have to comply to every
manufacturer's frameworks and security measures. On the other
hand you can directly sell software and services.

The embedded device I know best is my TV receiver, which boots
into Linux and then starts a statically compiled executable
that handles GUI rendering, remote control input and
communication with the hardware. If you knew the protocols you
could replace it with something written in Dlang.

These devices are not as prominent as phones, but the
barrier of entry is relatively low for many applications once
you have bindings to a couple of frequently needed C libraries
such as freetype, ffmpeg or opencv.

> 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:
>
>[…]
>
> 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.

As you can use mostly the same compiler targets for embedded
as for phones, your best bet to stabilize the ldc targets are
probably the embedded developers, because they can see the
immediate benefit for their projects and their knowledge about
the underlying hardware can help track down bugs.

-- 
Marco