On Tuesday, 11 September 2018 at 07:23:53 UTC, Joakim wrote:
I agree with a lot of what you say here, but I'm not sure what
you mean by "first class support for mobile." What exactly do
you believe D needs to reach that level?
Basically the things you describe. I was thinking of a stable and
easy build system, e.g.
$ dub init android [iOS]
$ dub --arch=arm64
And and of course check which language features work (or don't
work!) on ARM and write a documentation.
Cf. https://kotlinlang.org/docs/reference/native-overview.html
The thing is that D already has a lot of useful stuff like C/C++
and Objective-C interop. It would be a pity if we didn't use it.
I think most of the heavy lifting with core language and stdlib
support is done. What remains is polish and integration for the
build process and possibly IDEs and of course, making sure
there are D libraries to make mobile dev easier.
I will be sporadically polishing the build process over the
coming months, by getting much more building through dub. I
won't be doing anything with IDEs, as I don't use them.
As for libraries, that all depends on what you're doing and how
much others in the D community want that too.
It might be a good idea to set up a funding target to get the
iOS port back up to speed again. I don't use Apple products so
it won't be me picking up that porting work, but maybe Dan
could be enticed to finish it as a paid project, since he did
most of the voluntary work so far. I'm purely speculating, no
idea if money changes the equation for him, just know that he's
been too busy to work on it for the last couple years.
That'd be part of the first class support. That a dedicated team
works on it. Volunteers are not enough. Once it's polished it
will still need loads of maintenance.
