On 2012-07-21 19:51:37 +0000, Nick Sabalausky
<seewebsitetocontac...@semitwist.com> said:
On Sat, 21 Jul 2012 09:47:06 -0400
Michel Fortin <michel.for...@michelf.ca> wrote:
And also, more and more it'd require ARM support to be competitive in
the GUI area.
Yes. But there's an even bigger reason for ARM: Mobile devices, like
iOS and Android. I'm not personally a fan of them, but nonetheless those
things are HUGE (no pun intended). And yet the ONLY real language
choices there are C++, Java and Objective-C (and Lua if you count
"Son-of-Flash", ie Corona - which I don't count). And half of THOSE are
out of the question if you want cross platform, which any sane developer
should. So PERFECT fertile ground for D.
I know I keep harping on that, but it's a big issue for me since I'm
deep into that stuff now and goddamn do I wish I could be doing
it in D, but D's support on those devices (or just outputting C/C++)
unfortunately just isn't mature enough ATM.
For my part, in the last year I've been building a big codebase that
had to be C++ just because of this, with countless hours spent figuring
out things that would have been a lot easier to do in D.
Here's the problem as I came to realize it: no single project is going
to be enough to justify the investment required to make it happen.
Nobody's project is by itself big enough to make D/Objective-C
worthwhile to produce and maintain, because making it and then keeping
it in sync with both D and Apple's Objective-C is a huge effort that'll
in itself derail the project you were using to justify the investment.
So D/Objective-C has to stand as a project of its own somehow.
Also, making it a cross-platform thing would require a similar
investment for WinRT and Android (through JNI?). While it surely is
technically possible and would sure help a lot of developers move away
from C++, I'm not so sure such a thing will happen at all.
--
Michel Fortin
michel.for...@michelf.ca
http://michelf.ca/
