Windows 8 Metro support

[Sönke Ludwig]

(IMO) one of the biggest obstacles for truly broad adoption of D 
currently is the weak platform support on end user platforms. The two 
mobile platforms that came up recently (iOS and Android) are two 
examples. And indeed I think that support for mobile platforms could be 
a real stepping stone because of D's extraordinary convenience and 
language power - the alternatives to C/C++ are pretty thin here and 
cross-platform development in general has come to a grinding halt 
recently with all the proprietary languages and APIs. If D could step up 
here...

But mobile platforms aside, Windows support is something that in general 
has always been neglected a bit, especially regarding 64-bit support. 
Starting with Windows 8 there will arise additional problems because 
Metro application will only be able/allowed to use the COM based WinRT 
and the VisualStudio runtime. DMD with its use of snn.lib is out of the 
game here, just as the any other runtime library.

Right now, if we don't catch up here, D will slowly degrade to a pure 
server and command line application language which surely wouldn't do it 
justice.

In consequence this means that there is one more reason to raise the 
priority of COFF output from DMD (together with 64-bit codegen) - or 
possibly the alternative to make OptLink COFF-capable to at least be 
able to somehow link against the VS runtime.

Another such thing - although this can be worked around - would be 
direct support for Objective-C classes like in Michel Fortin's dmd 
modification. I think these GUI application related functionalities are 
by far the most important things for D's mass adoption. And personally, 
I would even be willing to donate a (for me) considerable amount of 
money to help bringing this forward because many things I would like to 
realize with D are currently (almost) impossible.