On Tuesday, 25 December 2018 at 07:10:46 UTC, rikki cattermole
wrote:
On 25/12/2018 6:01 PM, Joakim wrote:
See my responses to Nicholas above, I don't think the Android
port merits a talk. By the same standards I apply to others'
talks above, I don't think my work merits a talk either. ;)
A talk covering ARM and Android development in general would be
very well received in the context of D. If you want to be
convinced we could do a poll on who would want to see it (but I
expect quite a large number of people would be in support of).
I don't see how it could be worthwhile: nobody has ever given
such a DConf talk about a port to a specific platform because it
doesn't really make sense. The whole point of a port is to
abstract away the platform, so you can simply recompile most of
your D source for it, as H. S. Teoh has indicated he's been able
to do with the Android app he's been developing in D recently.
The way to do that talk is to abstract multiple ports into a
general porting guide, which is the talk Kai already gave, or
maybe talk about the details of a port to a very obscure or
different platform, as Igor did this year:
https://dconf.org/2018/talks/cesi.html
While it was fascinating to hear how much work he put into it,
much more than me, my interest was squelched somewhat because he
couldn't reveal the platform and it's likely I would never use it
anyway (not a game programmer). I mean, who really develops for
non-Windows, non-Posix OS platforms? I haven't since college. For
those few who do, maybe the talk was great. But the Android port
wasn't that obscure: it's basically a linux/ARM distro with a
different libc, Bionic.
If you really mean "ARM and Android development in general" and
not the details of the port, I can't claim much knowledge of
that, as I don't have a large Android codebase that I've
developed and deployed. Hopefully, even if I did, there would be
nothing to say: as it should be pretty similar to writing D code
for a desktop platform.
My phone- on whose 5.5" screen I'm viewing the text of this forum
response as I type it out on a separate, full-sized bluetooth
keyboard paired with it- has 6 GBs of RAM and 128 GBs of storage
(of which I have 8 GB free right now). That's about what midrange
desktops and laptops come with these days (though with much
larger screens ;) ), so you can't say mobile presents much of a
constraint in terms of hardware. I've pointed out before that I
compile code on my phone about as fast as a Macbook Air from a
couple years ago:
https://forum.dlang.org/thread/sqbtgmbtrorgthspl...@forum.dlang.org
If you see some other angle on an Android talk that I'm missing,
I'd be happy to hear it, but I don't see it. Maybe someday when I
have a huge, successful Android app in D, I'll write about or put
up a talk online about the architecture I used, but hopefully
there won't be much specific to Android there. :)