[DAddYE]

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

[CmonDev]

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

[josteink]

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

[jacobbudin]

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.

[pjmlp]

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.

[zak_mc_kracken]

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

[CmonDev]

Unity3d alone completely invalidates this claim.

[mnem]

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

[_random_]

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....

[riffraff]

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

[pjmlp]

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

[72deluxe]

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.

[threeseed]

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.

[pjmlp]

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.

[pjmlp]

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

[72deluxe]

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.