On 2011-01-30 18:53, Daniel Gibson wrote:
Am 30.01.2011 09:30, schrieb Gary Whatmore:
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.
- G.W.
Then it's not a smartphone, at least not a modern one.
jim_g was talking about Android phones and iphones, which are pretty
powerful and handle garbage collected languages just fine (android uses
java..)
Objective-C on iOS doesn't use the GC. But I think Mono does.
--
/Jacob Carlborg
