"Gary Whatmore" <[email protected]> wrote in message news:[email protected]... > Jonathan M Davis Wrote: > >> On Sunday 30 January 2011 00:05:59 Gary Whatmore 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). >> >> I do think that it would be a definite boon to be able to create D >> programs for >> smart phones, but the overall focus of D development has been on the >> language >> itself and the standard libraries, not on making it work on additional >> platforms. That's a backend issue. It will likely be addressed at some >> point, >> but it's not a priority. There's just too much else to do. >> >> Not to mention, until some of the D GUI toolkits - such as QtD - are more >> mature, I'm not sure how feasible it would be to create smart phone >> applications >> anyway. GUI development is not one of D's strong suits at this point. >> It's being >> addressed, but it takes time. > > Another point worth noting is that these phones are really limited. It > doesn't make sense to run a garbage collected D in them. Mine has 96x65 > pixels according to Wikipedia. It likely has few kilobytes of RAM. A > simple hello world wouldn't fit in the ram. Would be much better to > replace Qt for desktop users with a GUI written in D. >
With the GC stripped out (and safety checks in place to prevent accidential GC allocation), D would make a far better alternative to C/C++ for small platforms that can't handle a GC.
