Has D failed? ( unpopular opinion but I think yes )

[Julian]

On Friday, 12 April 2019 at 14:24:05 UTC, Chris wrote:
> Crystal and Nim also have C interop and afaik support Android
> and iOS (correct me if I'm wrong) and JS. C interop was one of
> the features that turned me onto D.

You're wrong. Android and iOS are both incredibly 
developer-hostile
platforms. There's almost nothing that supports development on
them, and a lot of what support exists is hackish and limited or
massively inconvenient vs. what you get with official development
tools.

It's not a case of "bindings vs. *real* libraries". It's "go write
your GUI with raw X11 networking instead of using any library --
and and BTW we're moving to Wayland and your X11 stuff will stop
working one day for important security reasons."

Some 'support' is even a lie. There's a StackOverflow answer that
earnestly suggested Clojure for Android development--linking to a
page that described Clojure apps as requiring several seconds just
to launch on Android. Scala was also promoted for Android, and
don't you mind that dalvik limitations and Scala class-spam mean
that your app will one day abruptly no longer work for extremely
hard to deal with reasons.

I once built an Android app with some Mercury in it, compiling to
Java. In the same way you can probably put Nim on Android by
compiling to JS and using some JS tool chains. You can also write 
a
Java launcher that manages UI, with other program logic via a
shared library or with IPC to a packaged CLI executable that's
running in the background. That gives you just about any language
with an ARM toolchain or C transpiling. If you don't care about
massive inconvenience vs. using the intended development kits.

I've stopped caring about mobile, but in Termux on a Android 
tablet
right here, I have ldc2 installed with apt, and can compile D code
on the go. For a while you could even build .apks directly on a
device, and install them locally, with 
http://www.spartacusrex.com/terminalide.htm
That made for some quick turn-around and I enjoyed working with it
while it lasted. It still wasn't as good as PalmOS development.