I happened across this old thread in a search for "mobile app
dlang". I got a Chromebook recently and it represents a
substantial phase shift in devices for me:
* It's an ARM laptop (Asus Chromebook R13, big.LITTLE 2/2 cores,
4GB memory)
* It's also a tablet convertible
* The main OS is the web browser
* The secondary OS is a Linux desktop(via Crouton)
* The other secondary OS is Android(Play Store support)
* They all run simultaneously. ChromeOS supports this with minor
end-user configuration(hit some secret shortcut keys for
developer mode, run a shell script, click some boxes).
* It cost under $300 (refurbished) and it's "high end" for the
product segment, and feels like it
Which means I have ~three software ecosystems(two if you're
feeling uncharitable, since all of them can do some web
browsing) on the same device, all representing different market
segments but more-or-less successfully converged. Although some
things like clipboard compatibility aren't in the offing, I can
switch between them with shortcut keys and share parts of the
file system without any virtualization or rebooting. And "high
end mobile" performance covers so many applications that as an
individual I can only justify trading up for certain heavy
workloads(large code-bases, high-end gaming, some media editing
and encoding). If I were feeling daring I could also try running
Wine, but that's better left to the x86 Chromebooks.
It's gotten me thinking that what we're looking at now is really
a fully converged computing environment where monopolistic
bottlenecks on software platforms are eroded, leaving us back in
the position of generic device form factors(type and quantity of
I/O, energy efficiency requirements) as the main constraints on
the application. So "mobile" may also cease to be a category of
substance at the same time as "desktop" and "Web". We'll just
have "front-end"/"client", plus some UI forms to cover different
devices.
At least, that's where we're going. But it's not "there" yet
except in this particular product line, since Google is forcing
the issue in it - and the sales figures do suggest that it's
carving up the PC category and invading schools everywhere.
That thought is playing in my head against recent advertising of
BetterC - the USP of "give new life to old code" seems like the
most straightforward way to address this future, since if we
change our set of assumptions away from "new platforms" in the
usual sense of a technology shift provoking boil-the-ocean
rewrites, but instead to a continual agglomeration of new into
old and old into new, with most shifts occurring within the
existing stacks instead of without, then leveraging old code by
every means possible becomes the most important thing.
Which leads me to a great armchair proposal: D should support
Excel spreadsheets ;)
