Mobile app support?

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 2013-01-25 00:24, Andrew Pennebaker wrote:
> What's the state of Android, iOS, and Windows RT support for D? Wouldn't
> it be great if we could write cross-platform mobile apps in a single
> language?

In general, not good. DMD cannot compile for ARM. You do have other 
options like GDC and LDC which are supposed to be able to compile for 
ARM. Don't know the state of the runtime on ARM for these compilers.

Except for the above, for iOS you would want to interact with 
Objective-C, which is kind of a pain in the ass. The correct solution is 
to make D ABI compatible with Objective-C. Michel Fortin has been 
working on this, he released an alpha version of his DMD fork that is 
usable. But unfortunately he has not worked on it for a couple of years. 
That was also only for Mac OS X, not for iOS.

http://michelf.ca/projects/d-objc/

Another option is to use the Objective-C runtime functions (which are in 
plain C) and use them manually or with the help of a bridge. That has 
its own problems, like a Hello World application (desktop) taking around 
60MB due to code bloat.

Objective-C bridge: http://www.dsource.org/projects/dstep

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg