On 2011-01-30 09:17, 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.
- Jonathan M Davis
With modifications to dmd to allow binding to Objective-C libraries
(currently in progress) and using gdc/ldc could probably allow to create
iOS applications using XCode and Interface Builder.
--
/Jacob Carlborg
