https://www.thurrott.com/mobile/7541/google-doesnt-quite-deny-chrome-os-android-story
Paulo and I looked into the future and predicted this in June:
Paulo: "Eventually Google will realize [Chromebooks] are as
useful as WebOS and will merge them with Android."
http://forum.dlang.org/post/[email protected]
Me: "ChromeOS strikes me as google trying to use their one hammer
everywhere, even when there are no nails, ie they're built around
the web so they made an OS out of it. But it's frankly kind of a
dumb idea, I don't see it lasting.
They're working on a multi-window mode for Android, early
versions of which have been found by those spelunking through the
recent Android M preview. Once that's done, I suspect they'll
start putting Android on laptops too and kill off Chrome OS."
http://forum.dlang.org/post/[email protected]
Android and iOS are gunning for laptops next, with their recently
announced Pixel C and iPad Pro, I'm sure desktops will soon
follow. When those two platforms went after Windows
Mobile/Phone, they burned it to the ground:
http://bgr.com/2011/12/13/apple-and-google-dominate-smartphone-space-while-other-vendors-scramble/
Why does this matter for D? Well, D's still barely on mobile.
Dan has been providing ldc builds that cross-compile to iOS since
July and nobody has confirmed that it works for them. I provided
patches that'd let anyone compile a mostly working Android
cross-compiler build of ldc soon afterwards, no confirmed usage
of that either (several people have run the test runner I made
available this weekend, thanks to them).
Mobile is a giant opportunity for Ahead-of-Time (AoT) compiled
languages like D. The web revolution during the '90s and '00s
led to the rise of scripting languages, like ruby or python,
because they could be run easily on the server and used with a
web frontend. The current mobile revolution has led to a
resurgence of AoT-compiled languages, with Obj-C taking off and
Java and C# finally going AoT-compiled on Android and WP.
However, there is no single cross-platform AoT-compiled language
you can use on all of these mobile platforms. There is no modern
language you can use on all of them, as Swift is still iOS-only.
D could be that language, the mobile wave is one D cannot afford
to miss.
