Chrome OS folding into Android, Android coming to laptops

[Jakob Ovrum via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 3 November 2015 at 09:06:57 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> Android and iOS are gunning for laptops next, with their 
> recently announced Pixel C and iPad Pro, I'm sure desktops will 
> soon follow.  When those two platforms went after Windows 
> Mobile/Phone, they burned it to the ground:
>
> http://bgr.com/2011/12/13/apple-and-google-dominate-smartphone-space-while-other-vendors-scramble/

I think it's important to consider the divide between consumers 
and, for lack of a better term at the top of my head, "content 
creators". Mobile OS' notably lack support for the latter use 
cases, like writing documents and spreadsheets, multimedia 
editing, programming etc. Mobile OS on laptop hardware will 
probably initially be competing solely for the consumer market, 
including the segment that already moved to tablets.

This isn't just a random digression, I think this matters for D. 
Maybe my interpretation is too simplistic, but I don't think D 
has a presence in consumer-oriented software on traditional OS' 
either, what with the lack of drive behind GUI infrastructure. If 
we move on mobile application front-ends, this will be mostly new 
territory for D. But maybe we will first and foremost see D 
encroach on the spot that C++ has on Android today, which in my 
impression appears to be in games and optimized background 
services. For Android in particular, it's much easier for us to 
bind the C++ API than the Java API.

> Why does this matter for D?  Well, D's still barely on mobile.  
> Dan has been providing ldc builds that cross-compile to iOS 
> since July and nobody has confirmed that it works for them.  I 
> provided patches that'd let anyone compile a mostly working 
> Android cross-compiler build of ldc soon afterwards, no 
> confirmed usage of that either (several people have run the 
> test runner I made available this weekend, thanks to them).

I'll give it a go. I've experimented with D on Linux/ARM before, 
I just haven't had a project I want to run on any of my ARM 
devices.

> However, there is no single cross-platform AoT-compiled 
> language you can use on all of these mobile platforms.  There 
> is no modern language you can use on all of them, as Swift is 
> still iOS-only.  D could be that language, the mobile wave is 
> one D cannot afford to miss.

What do you think the roadmap should be for improving D's 
presence on mobile?