On Thursday, 26 December 2013 at 05:55:08 UTC, Rikki Cattermole
wrote:
I disagree with D not having a good chance at web development.
PHP is a good language for small to medium sites that need to
be done quickly. But if you need to scale or do anything
complex its really not a good solution. This is the market I
believe D does have a chance with especially with Java decline
from grace.
If everybody needed to scale or do something complex, why would
php still be so popular? Most sites aren't facebook, turning
their php into C++ over time. ;) I agree that D could have a
niche on the performant side of web dev, taking over for Java a
bit, but that's not a huge piece of the market.
As you said about mobile, sure but that would limit to
basically windows mobile. Once we have ARM support. Android has
issues as a lot of api is in Java not native. So wrapping with
JNI would be required which would be bad. With iOS would need
extern Objective-C support and to get toolchain approved by
Apple, which I don't see happening anytime soon.
I wonder how hard it is to integrate non-Microsoft languages with
WinRT and Metro. Android has a lot of native support these days-
you can build completely native apks if you want- but yeah, JNI
is necessary for some APIs. I don't see why that's "bad," just
the price of being on Android, as you're going to need to
integrate with the platform APIs everywhere.
Does iOS really require Apple to bless your toolchain? Free
Pascal has iOS support and I doubt Apple ever approved them. The
iOS developer agreement says you can't use interpreted code,
which they put in there to block Flash, but I don't think they
require approval of your toolchain if it's producing native
binaries. I'd never develop for iOS though, so I don't know for
sure.
Even if we do disclude app side of things, mobile apps quite
often have a web service component as well. But thats web
development essentially.
Not really. Just because you're using HTTP for transport, to
avoid firewalls or whatever, doesn't make it "web development."
In fact, mobile is leading to a lot of innovation in networking
protocols, so web services are not necessary:
https://www.belshe.com/2013/01/31/custom-protocols-everywhere/
On Thursday, 26 December 2013 at 07:29:28 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote:
Guys, lets not waste too much energy debating what the
killer-app for D may or may not end up being. We have no idea
what it will be or when it will happen. Let's just focus on
building a high-quality language and tool-chain so that someone
can build said killer-app.
Just spitballing. :) Who knows? Maybe somebody will take an idea
from this thread and run with it.
On Thursday, 26 December 2013 at 09:03:30 UTC, John Colvin wrote:
On Thursday, 26 December 2013 at 03:34:55 UTC, Joakim wrote:
The problem with web devs is that D is too heavy for them.
This is why most of them use php, maybe ruby or java, and not
C++. I think D doing well in web dev is a lost cause, better
to focus on native GUI apps, especially on mobile. Vibe.d is
a great project, but I don't see it ever catching on in the
wider web dev community.
Too heavy for some casual developers perhaps, but the speed
advantage of D might be worth it for those who have higher
server loads to contend with.
In that case, why aren't they using C++ already? If the argument
is that D is as performant as C++ but as easy to use as ruby, so
it will crack that niche, I think D is far from being that easy.
For example, how many java or ruby programmers, forget about php,
;) think about static vs dynamic arrays? That leads to questions
like this one:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9245539/what-is-the-point-of-having-static-arrays
These kinds of issues leak out in D all over the place and
represent a barrier for the average web dev. Don't get me wrong,
I think D does a remarkable job of smoothing the rough edges of
C/C++. I just don't think D will ever be suited for most of that
web dev niche and that's fine. The high-end, performant sites
who might resort to C++ normally can still use D, and the more
numerous, smaller webapps can use the scripting framework du
jour, whether rails or node.
