On 2012-07-22 19:05:45 +0000, Nick Sabalausky
<seewebsitetocontac...@semitwist.com> said:
On Sun, 22 Jul 2012 08:19:12 -0400
Michel Fortin <michel.for...@michelf.ca> wrote:
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.
FWIW, Marmalade ( www.madewithmarmalade.com ) has already done the
legwork to allow crossplatform natively-compiled C++ code that works on
iOS, Android and a bunch of other less "hip" stuff like Bada, WebOS,
Symbian, and some version of mobile windows (6, IIRC). I'm sure
they'll be doing WinRT at some point if not already working on it. They
do abstract away the underlying OS calls (including usage of
Objective-C), although they also provide a (somewhat roundabout) way to
access them directly if you need. Unfortunately, it's not open-source
and it's somewhat pricey, but point is, C++ across all those platforms
does at least exist.
Marmalade, from what I see, is some sort of meta-platform you can use
to write something that works everywhere. It adds a new layer of
abstraction that can work on top of each platform. Good for them and
their developers, but I generally try to avoid unnecessary layers like
this. It often makes things harder to debug and fix, and will always
lag behind the functionalities each of platform has to offer.
No, the idea is to make the D *language* work with each platform's
object model. Just like D can call and define C functions with zero
overhead, it should be capable of defining classes from other languages
too and overriding their functions with zero overhead. That way you can
talk directly with each platform's API with no middle man playing a
complicated translation/abstraction process in the middle.
Also, on the Android, you don't need to deal with the JVM (or whatever
Google's version of it is called). Apparently that used to
be the case, but now you can just use straight C++, even without third
party tools like Marmalade.
But all the interface widgets are still in Java, no? If you're working
on an OpenGL/ES game maybe you won,t need them, but if you're building
any other kind of app, you'll have to play with JNI a lot. Or add
Marmalade as an abstraction layer. Either way it's suboptimal compared
to using directly the APIs you need.
There's a lot of about Google and Android I
don't like, but as usual: At least it's not *quite* as shitty as dealing
with Apple's inevitably putrid offering.
With Apple's platform, integrating a C++ backend with an Objective-C
frontend is quite a breeze: both object models mix very well together.
It's pretty much the same thing as Microsoft did with WinRT: regular
C++ classes mix with WinRT classes in the same source file pretty much
in the same way. Try do that with Android's UI classes written in Java.
But maybe I misunderstood what you're referring to.
--
Michel Fortin
michel.for...@michelf.ca
http://michelf.ca/
