Jonathan M Davis Wrote: > On Sunday 30 January 2011 00:05:59 Gary Whatmore wrote: > > jim_g Wrote: > > > 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. > > > > That's clearly not true. D is a revolutionary new language. It's supposed > > to replace most of the mainstream language including C/C++, C#, Objective > > C, and Java. The scripting capabilities also make D a good competitor for > > the notorious Python, leading to several orders of magnitude better > > performance than slow VM languages give. We have a Python fan (bearphile) > > in this mailing list who has several times shown how D outperforms Python > > (which probably is the fastest scripting language). > > > > D's main focus currently is 32-bit x86 servers and desktop applications. > > This is where the big market has traditionally been. Not everyone has > > 64-bit hardware and I have my doubts about the size of the smartphone > > markets. The modern iterators, streams, and XML processing in Phobos 2 > > help in these a lot. D is also fully open source which means it's a > > perfect replacement for open source frameworks (Qt). > > I do think that it would be a definite boon to be able to create D programs > for > smart phones, but the overall focus of D development has been on the language > itself and the standard libraries, not on making it work on additional > platforms. That's a backend issue. It will likely be addressed at some point, > but it's not a priority. There's just too much else to do. > > Not to mention, until some of the D GUI toolkits - such as QtD - are more > mature, I'm not sure how feasible it would be to create smart phone > applications > anyway. GUI development is not one of D's strong suits at this point. It's > being > addressed, but it takes time.
Another point worth noting is that these phones are really limited. It doesn't make sense to run a garbage collected D in them. Mine has 96x65 pixels according to Wikipedia. It likely has few kilobytes of RAM. A simple hello world wouldn't fit in the ram. Would be much better to replace Qt for desktop users with a GUI written in D. - G.W.