Mobile app support?

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 2013-01-25 20:37, Johannes Pfau wrote:

> I don't remember anyone working on Windows RT or iOS. Michel Fortin has
> code to interface to ObjC which would benefit iOS development:
> * A template based solution, but IIRC that created to much bloat and
>    development was stopped.

You can do it manually to avoid bloat but that is very tedious.

> * A dmd patch which added extern(ObjC).
>    http://michelf.ca/projects/d-objc/
>    I'm not sure what's the status here. IIRC I thought it was a quite
>    intrusive language change (it added additional syntax except from
>    extern(ObjC)), but with UDAs + compiler support it could probably be
>    adapted to make it less controversial. Either way it would be a huge
>    patch and huge patches tend to get not reviewed merged into dmd so
>    it's difficult.

It hasn't had an update for two or three years.

> * Google castrated it's libc: it doesn't support TLS. D can't work
>    without TLS. (Things might get better with C++/11 which also has TLS
>    support). AFAIK google was just to lazy to implement TLS (Java
>    doesn't need it), ARM/Linux even provides hardware support for fast
>    TLS (TLS register).
> * GCC has emulated TLS. It would be slow but it could work. Except that
>    it can't work with the D garbage collector right now. It could be
>    integrated with some effort, but it would veeeery be slow. (Basically
>    emuTLS allocates small distinct memory ranges, real TLS has one big
>    range per thread. Now the GC needs to get all ranges and scan them.
>    Our current approach can't get the small ranges. Even if we could
>    make it work scanning many small ranges is slow)

DMD on Mac OS X currently uses an emulated TLS.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg