Re: What about Embedded?

[Jamie McCracken <jamiemcc blueyonder co uk>]

Philip Van Hoof wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-07-20 at 23:24 +0100, Jamie McCracken wrote:
>
> > > And this is why GNOME should accept and go for higher programming
> > > languages and modern development techniques.
>  
> > I totally agree but wouldn't it be better to use native languages that 
> > offer all this like the D language (http://www.digitalmars.com/d/).
>
> I think most of the people that ever talked with me on IRC already know
> that I'm very much a fan of the D programming language.

Great :)

> > No one has ever justified why we need a VM given all its disadvantages 
> > (speed - especially when mixing with native code, startup time, resource 
> > usage, bloat etc)
>
> A program that runs in a virtual machine can benefit from run-time
> optimization. If you want to do the same with a native application, you
> would need to feed the compiler with statistics which you need to gather
> from your users. Which isn't always an easy task.

D *easily* beats mono and java in every benchmark so runtime 
optimisations count for very little here.

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/debian/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=dlang&lang2=csharp


[snip]
> Even for mobile devices. But you make a good point with D. I would love
> to develop using D for the Nokia 770. In fact, I have plans to build
> myself a cross GCC compiler with an ARM backend and a D frontend soon.

Great the more of us that use D in gnome the more likely it will get 
accepted at some future date.


> And then ... fuck the convention that everything must be done in a
> popular language to be accepted by some community. Then they don't
> accept it. That's their problem. 

I believe Mono was rejected mostly by Sun Developers with concerns over 
bloat and memory usage being high on the list (and maybe a few political 
reasons).

D does not have these issues and if a few of us Gnome developers start 
using it we may find we can get in Gnome one day :)


> > The D language offers the best of all worlds IMO *without* compromising 
> > on speed, resource usage or bloat. It would be madness to use a VM instead!
>
> There's still some pro VM arguments that D doesn't have. Like a good
> reflection framework (Hibernate uses this a lot). 

Why do we need reflection?

If and when Gobject gets full introspection it will become irrelevant.

Reflection does affect performance too which is why D avoided it and 
stuck to introspectable properties only. D has made sensible design 
choices by following Delphi's design instead of java/c#.


> Oh .. And now that I mention Hibernate. The current popular languages
> (Java and .NET) have A LOT frameworks (Spring, Hibernate, etc) that
> don't (yet) exist in the D world. (there's NSpring and NHibernate Java
> guys, you don't have to tell me I'm selling Java-only tech because you
> would be lying).
>
> Most of them don't even have an equivalent in any of those "native"
> languages. I assure you such frameworks DO speed up software devel-
> opment.
>
> I would very much want GNOME application developers to start leveraging
> such frameworks.

We already have most of what we need in Gnome already for building cool 
desktop apps - we just need D bindings for the Gnome specific stuff.



--
Mr Jamie McCracken
http://jamiemcc.livejournal.com/