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Comment by DAddYE | Hacker News Reader

Yep, we damn need a bit of more competition within bigs, right now seems just between Google and Mozilla (for the type of language).

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C# is in front of all three in mobile space (it compiles to native of course).

C# is the only language that is both modern and spans all major mobile platforms.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xamarin

Sure. But Xamarin is hardly open-source, and what OP was looking for was a open-sourced tool-chain & stack for mobile development.

You can't even build Xamarin's sample project without demoing a commercial license, because the sample project is falls outside the app size restriction.

Considering the minuscule market share that Windows Mobile currently has, C# is close to nonexistent on mobile as of today.

Unity3d alone completely invalidates this claim.

Are there many apps written in Unity? Or is it only games?

Mostly games which are a kind of apps. And games are the most popular apps, e.g.: http://www.statista.com/statistics/270291/popular-categories....

Except you are forgetting C++11 is supported in all mobile SDKs, with C++14 appearing in upcoming versions.

Personally I consider C++14 quite modern.

I think at this point we also have facebook embracing D ?

What competition?!? Until either of them support their languages on their respective OSs there isn't any competition.

I think without the supporting runtime libraries also being open-source, there isn't any point in open-sourcing the language is there?

I mean, look at GNUStep. Not widespread adoption.

Agreed. I gave up following GNUStep back in 2003, the last time I used WindowMaker as my window manager.

Fond memories. I used to use WindowMaker on my old RH 6.2 system (or was it 7?), maybe even Fedora 1. But I never understood the dock - I was expecting a Windows-style task bar and the dock really isn't that.

The fact that it sat beneath other windows meant you had to constantly shift windows to get to it, which I found frustrating. Likely a configuration option?

It probably runs excellently on modern hardware, albeit with no GPU acceleration or anything to reduce main CPU cycles.

Actually there is. One of the big selling points of Go is its ability to produce self contained binaries. Swift would share this but also be a language that is more full featured.

GNUStep failure is more to do with Objective-C being such an odd language for most people.

All compilers that produce native code are capable of producing static executables and libraries.

This is only a selling point to developers that mix language with implementation, or never used a native code compiler.

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