On Sun, Jan 30, 2011 at 2:05 AM, Gary Whatmore <[email protected]> wrote:
> jim_g Wrote: > > > What I tried to say is, in my opinion, a language with only a half or a > quarter of D's improvements over C++ would be more successful on > smartphone/tablet platforms than yet another x86 oriented language, no > matter how good. The killer feature is to be in the right place and the > right time. > > That's clearly not true. D is a revolutionary new language. It's supposed > to replace most of the mainstream language including C/C++, C#, Objective C, > and Java. The scripting capabilities also make D a good competitor for the > notorious Python, leading to several orders of magnitude better performance > than slow VM languages give. We have a Python fan (bearphile) in this > mailing list who has several times shown how D outperforms Python (which > probably is the fastest scripting language). > > D's main focus currently is 32-bit x86 servers and desktop applications. > This is where the big market has traditionally been. Not everyone has 64-bit > hardware and I have my doubts about the size of the smartphone markets. The > modern iterators, streams, and XML processing in Phobos 2 help in these a > lot. D is also fully open source which means it's a perfect replacement for > open source frameworks (Qt). > > The trick is that in the smartphone market, once you get a SDK working in a certain language, you're done. There simply aren't the legacy issues you see with other applications. Look at the iPhone. Nobody really cared about Objective C (unless they were Mac application developers, but that was mainly a niche market) until iPhone mobile applications came around and made it important. Android did something similar because JavaME never really took off, and suddenly mobile Java was important. That's not a new language, but it's a market that never really existed before, and Android pushed Java into it by developing the Dalvik JVM and a reasonable SDK and pushing them both to developers. There was a Java SDK, so everyone started using Java.
