Smartphones and D

[jim_g]

jim_g Wrote:

> Jonathan M Davis Wrote:
> 
> > On Saturday 29 January 2011 21:45:33 jim_g wrote:
> > > Hello
> > > 
> > > I'm currently doing business with 4 commercial applications on Android 2.1+
> > > and iPhone 3GS+. One of the current problems is that we're facing the
> > > limits of performance especially when developing Java which is interpreted
> > > on the oldest hardware. Thanks to reddit I read about D recently and it
> > > seems to hit the head of the nail squarely. I've used to think that more
> > > performance means less "power" in the language when thinking in ways of
> > > simplicity (easy to read), high level language features (nameless
> > > functions) and so on. BUT D has it all in a nice package and solves all
> > > these issues.
> > > 
> > > My question is, how well does D support ARMv6 and ARMv7? I'd like to make
> > > full use of auto-vectorization and inlining when doing foreach loops,
> > > iterators with inline predicates, and array operations. Our problem with C
> > > on ARM is that many compilers are still far from good. We wouldn't want to
> > > buy a commercial compiler unless it's really worth its salt. Reading this
> > > newsgroup revealed that D uses some kind of thing called 'lowerings' for
> > > optimizing high level features. Does this avoid all these complex bugs?
> > > 
> > > Another question is, does D have any tutorials for building stuff on ARM?
> > > Any Android/iOS bindings anywhere? Has anyone done any Android/iPhone
> > > development in D? Would you recommend D instead of C/C++ for these
> > > platforms? If not, how long will it take before D beats C/C++ on these
> > > platforms? How I see it is there's not much time left to earn big money on
> > > these. Some popular applications already become (adware) free because of
> > > piracy and competition.
> > 
> > gdc or LDC might be able to build for ARM. I don't know. But dmd is x86 only 
> > (with x86_64 on the way). So, at the moment, you're not going to be able to 
> > build for ARM using dmd. I suspect that gdc can do it, since it's using gcc for 
> > its backend, but I don't know.
> > 
> > There's probably a good chance that dmd will support ARM _eventually_ - as long 
> > as there's sufficient demand for it - but I doubt that it will any time soon. I 
> > expect that there are too many other things that need to be done for it to be a 
> > high priority at the moment.
> > 
> > - Jonathan M Davis
> 
> Thanks for the reply. In my opinion this is a huge shame. The x86 market is oversaturated with languages, but if you're doing something "exotic", there's only C/C++. Btw ARM isn't especially exotic. Most portable devices except laptops have used it for years. While there are many language platforms for smartphones, for example Java, C#, Obj-C, C, C++, JavaScript, and Python, none of these are especially high level and performance oriented at the same time.

What I tried to say is, in my opinion, a language with only a half or a quarter of D's improvements over C++ would be more successful on smartphone/tablet platforms than yet another x86 oriented language, no matter how good. The killer feature is to be in the right place and the right time.

 = jim =