On Saturday 29 January 2011 21:45:33 jim_g wrote: > Hello > > I'm currently doing business with 4 commercial applications on Android 2.1+ > and iPhone 3GS+. One of the current problems is that we're facing the > limits of performance especially when developing Java which is interpreted > on the oldest hardware. Thanks to reddit I read about D recently and it > seems to hit the head of the nail squarely. I've used to think that more > performance means less "power" in the language when thinking in ways of > simplicity (easy to read), high level language features (nameless > functions) and so on. BUT D has it all in a nice package and solves all > these issues. > > My question is, how well does D support ARMv6 and ARMv7? I'd like to make > full use of auto-vectorization and inlining when doing foreach loops, > iterators with inline predicates, and array operations. Our problem with C > on ARM is that many compilers are still far from good. We wouldn't want to > buy a commercial compiler unless it's really worth its salt. Reading this > newsgroup revealed that D uses some kind of thing called 'lowerings' for > optimizing high level features. Does this avoid all these complex bugs? > > Another question is, does D have any tutorials for building stuff on ARM? > Any Android/iOS bindings anywhere? Has anyone done any Android/iPhone > development in D? Would you recommend D instead of C/C++ for these > platforms? If not, how long will it take before D beats C/C++ on these > platforms? How I see it is there's not much time left to earn big money on > these. Some popular applications already become (adware) free because of > piracy and competition.
gdc or LDC might be able to build for ARM. I don't know. But dmd is x86 only (with x86_64 on the way). So, at the moment, you're not going to be able to build for ARM using dmd. I suspect that gdc can do it, since it's using gcc for its backend, but I don't know. There's probably a good chance that dmd will support ARM _eventually_ - as long as there's sufficient demand for it - but I doubt that it will any time soon. I expect that there are too many other things that need to be done for it to be a high priority at the moment. - Jonathan M Davis
