On Friday, 26 July 2019 at 12:22:47 UTC, Guillaume Piolat wrote:
> On Thursday, 25 July 2019 at 14:08:20 UTC, Ethan wrote:
>> On Thursday, 25 July 2019 at 13:49:39 UTC, Newbie2019 wrote:
>>> IOS https://github.com/smolt/ldc-iphone-dev/releases only have 0.17.0-alpha1 (2.068.2 FE) LLVM 3.6.2.
>>
>> Sweet zombie Jesus that's dire.
>>
>> Mobile game developers make the lion's share of their income from iOS.
>>
>> I can deal with development builds of a compiler. But that needs to be in a significantly better state for people to even consider D on mobile a serious thing.
>>
>> And, you know, in general, there's more mobile devices on the web than desktop devices.
>
> As someone also interested in iOS in LDC, maybe we can pool money to make it happen?
>
> There are other companies interested in iOS target in LDC.

For example, other interested parties here: https://forum.dlang.org/post/chggdrupcmfajnpevkai@forum.dlang.org

On Friday, 26 July 2019 at 12:22:47 UTC, Guillaume Piolat wrote:
> As someone also interested in iOS in LDC, maybe we can pool money to make it happen?
>
> There are other companies interested in iOS target in LDC.

I willing to donate 100$ for anyone made LDC latest version working for IOS with betterC (include tls support, but not mandatory for druntime support).

On Thursday, 25 July 2019 at 17:07:03 UTC, Newbie2019 wrote:
> On Thursday, 25 July 2019 at 14:08:20 UTC, Ethan wrote:
>
>
> I believe mobile hardware is get more and more powerful and necessary for everybody.  The next year Arm A77 and Apple A13  will fast then laptop.
>
> This is a huge market and the largest number of user groups ever.
>   D core team should take mobile serious and provide basic support.
>
> The current status is limit support from LDC team,  and  about zero man hours investment into IOS for so many years(last release since 2015).
>
> Android in a better status, but we loss the key developer last year.
>
>
> Consider there is consider there is about five billion people use mobile every more than 2 hours every day, but  D language developer  investment zero man hours into IOS for so many years.
>
> I can't image how many opportunity is passed for D.

The lack of support for mobile (I first inquired about mobile support in 2015) was the ultimate deal breaker for me. It's not rocket science, one could see that mobile was getting more and more important and people would ask if the software also worked on mobile. The answer would be embarrassing, as in "No, but D has CTFE and mixins."

So I _had_ to move on. I stopped all development in D and started to rewrite the code in Kotlin (which btw was / is a real pleasure).

I still can't get my head around the way mobile has been treated by the leadership and parts of the community. It's so darn obvious that mobile is important (e.g. gaming as the OP said) and yet it is treated like an unimportant detail only some people care about. Apparently D wants to compete with Go/Rust and emulate their features. But the thing is that mobile development attracts a huge crowd and D could clearly benefit from that, but nobody seems to care. I wonder why that is. I really do wonder. As the OP pointed out gaming + mobile is a huge market, but devs are forced to use C++ instead. What a waste. And as for the "Then DIY" brigade, no, mobile support should be clean and out of the box, not a hack, because it's going to be a product. Therefore it should be dealt with by the core team in order to have seamless integration.

On Saturday, 27 July 2019 at 08:52:19 UTC, Chris wrote:
> The lack of support for mobile (I first inquired about mobile support in 2015) was the ultimate deal breaker for me.

I think the deal breaker here is that the whole thing must happen on Macintosh and XCode.

On 27/07/2019 9:31 PM, Kagamin wrote:
> On Saturday, 27 July 2019 at 08:52:19 UTC, Chris wrote:
>> The lack of support for mobile (I first inquired about mobile support in 2015) was the ultimate deal breaker for me.
> 
> I think the deal breaker here is that the whole thing must happen on Macintosh and XCode.

You can rent VM's so that's not an issue.
At some point you will need to get a license from Apple if you are selling software so there is going to be cost involved no matter what we do.

On Saturday, 27 July 2019 at 05:15:57 UTC, Newbie2019 wrote:
> I willing to donate 100$ for anyone made LDC latest version working for IOS with betterC (include tls support, but not mandatory for druntime support).

When my company gets off the ground, I fully intend on investing in D financially.

But right now I'm cash strapped.

It's a bootstrap paradox for me. Chickens and eggs and all those other things.

On Saturday, 27 July 2019 at 12:04:38 UTC, Ethan wrote:
> When my company gets off the ground, I fully intend on investing in D financially.
>
> But right now I'm cash strapped.
>
> It's a bootstrap paradox for me. Chickens and eggs and all those other things.

And now we've got a bug bounty system.

Which means it's time to collect all the issues together that stop iOS/Android support being a first-class supported OS in D and throw some money at them directly.

On Fri, Jul 26, 2019 at 10:20 PM Newbie2019 via Digitalmars-d <digitalmars-d@puremagic.com> wrote:
>
> On Friday, 26 July 2019 at 12:22:47 UTC, Guillaume Piolat wrote:
> > As someone also interested in iOS in LDC, maybe we can pool money to make it happen?
> >
> > There are other companies interested in iOS target in LDC.
>
> I willing to donate 100$ for anyone made LDC latest version working for IOS with betterC (include tls support, but not mandatory for druntime support).

If there's a path to finance 1st class D support on mobile, I'll
contribute substantially.
I would he happy to do a classic thing like, for every donation to
that effort, I will contribute an additional 50%...

I don't know anybody who could work on this as a serious project who
is motivated by money though... we probably need $3-5k at least to
make someone interested.
LDC needs to have official iOS/Android build distributions with unit
tests passing... how do we get there?

On Tuesday, 20 August 2019 at 00:38:36 UTC, Manu wrote:
> I don't know anybody who could work on this as a serious project who
> is motivated by money though... we probably need $3-5k at least to

I'm between jobs right now, 3-5k might actually get my attention.

But every time I look into mobile for myself, I just can't bring myself to care. To the extent that I want custom functionality on one of these devices, I just go back to web stuff. So so so so so much lower barrier to entry and then it works in other places too.

But meh I've done stuff for money I personally don't use before and could again. Just for like $100 bounties that doesn't even cover enough time to seriously get started on something like this.

On Mon, Aug 19, 2019 at 8:20 PM Adam D. Ruppe via Digitalmars-d <digitalmars-d@puremagic.com> wrote:
>
> On Tuesday, 20 August 2019 at 00:38:36 UTC, Manu wrote:
> > I don't know anybody who could work on this as a serious
> > project who
> > is motivated by money though... we probably need $3-5k at least
> > to
>
> I'm between jobs right now, 3-5k might actually get my attention.
>
> But every time I look into mobile for myself, I just can't bring myself to care. To the extent that I want custom functionality on one of these devices, I just go back to web stuff. So so so so so much lower barrier to entry and then it works in other places too.
>
> But meh I've done stuff for money I personally don't use before and could again. Just for like $100 bounties that doesn't even cover enough time to seriously get started on something like this.

Right, it's not a 3-digit problem. It's probably a 5-digit problem,
but in the D community, a 4-digit sum requires quite a bit of
rallying.
I think if someone (like yourself) who had the confidence of the
community and a record for delivering were to take the challenge, we
could probably arrange to fund it.
Most computers on earth run Android or iOS, and it's embarrassing for
us that we don't have a toolchain that works out of the box, and
passes CI.
We even have extern(Objective-C) readily available! It's such a missed
opportunity!