Google Android

[Georg Wrede]

Tomas Lindquist Olsen wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 11:29 AM, Georg Wrede <georg.wrede at iki.fi> wrote:
>> Tomas Lindquist Olsen wrote:
>>> 2009/4/29 Robert Fraser <fraserofthenight at gmail.com>:
>>>> Weed wrote:
>>>>> Is it possible to implement support for Google Android on the D?
>>>> Perhaps, but it'd be easier to implement support for D on the Google
>>>> Android
>>>> :-).
>>>>
>>>> LDC might be able to generate .class files, which can be run through the
>>>> Android thingy to get them into a format gor which Google doesn't have to
>>>> pay Sun. The trick would be integrating D and Java's GCs. You can
>>>> probably
>>>> already get a *very* simple program which doesn't use the D runtime
>>>> working
>>>> by using LDC to generate a .bc, using the LLVM JVM backend to write out a
>>>> .class file and run it through the google thing. Not sure if anyone's
>>>> tried
>>>> it, though.
>>>>
>>> According to wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Android )
>>> it should be possible to run native ARM code, even though it's not
>>> officially supported by google.
>>>
>>> It's probably possible to get a full D implementation, but someone
>>> would just have to fix Tango on ARM ;)
>> I'd just hate to create statically linked programs on a small machine. Feels
>> like a massive waste of space.
>>
>> Typically I'd think the apps would be less than a thousand lines of code,
>> and already having several tens of such binaries could either take a small
>> or a huge amount of memory.
> 
> LDC has supported shared libs (including a shared runtime) for quite a
> while, of course I'm not sure about the state of PIC codegen in LLVM's
> ARM backend, but I'd guess it's working.

It's been my dream ever since I started with D (oh boy, ages ago) to be 
able to replace C as the preferred language for small gadgets. Maybe I 
will see the day, after all!