On 2012-04-09 16:39:30 +0000, Sönke Ludwig <[email protected]> said:
Right now, if we don't catch up here, D will slowly degrade to a pure server and command line application language which surely wouldn't do it justice.
I share your feeling. In fact, I'm not using D anywhere right now because it'd be too inconvenient for what I do most of the time.
Another such thing - although this can be worked around - would be direct support for Objective-C classes like in Michel Fortin's dmd modification. I think these GUI application related functionalities are by far the most important things for D's mass adoption.
And the reason GUI apps are so important is because they're the front end of most back ends. If using D on the back end makes it harder to build the user interface because of the language barrier, then that's a huge downside to using D on the back end of any project where the goal includes a user interface. For me at least, C++ is much better choice for the backend of a GUI app at the moment mostly it intermixes easily with Objective-C.
And personally, I would even be willing to donate a (for me) considerable amount of money to help bringing this forward because many things I would like to realize with D are currently (almost) impossible.
I started the D/Objective-C project, patching DMD, because after a huge attempt at making a bridge I found out it wasn't going to cut it. The need for an intermediate layer at the language level is a huge liability: it costs compilation time, slows down the program, bloats the executable size, and it increases the memory footprint.
The problem is that D/Objective-C still needs a huge investment in development time to become really useful. It's more a proof of concept as it is now. The most important blocks have been shown to work, but the difficulty lies in getting all the details/variants right, integrating with the GC, automatic reference counting, Apple's Modern runtime, ARM, etc.
I'd love to take your money to free some of my time so I can continue working on this project. But I'm not too confident it will ever reach a satisfactory state without a huge time investment on my part. And I can't spare that investment myself, hence why the project is stalled.
As for WinRT and the C++ extensions Microsoft has created for it, it looks very similar to what I've been doing to integrate Objective-C into D. No doubt my work could be reused to also add similar WinRT support.
-- Michel Fortin [email protected] http://michelf.com/
