Hello,

I'm pleased to announce a new java prototype application that is designed to translate java source into D source. Or any other language that support package, class, interface, and enum constructs and provides a built in memory garbage collection. Supporting D with JavacTo was my first choice!

JavacTo available at:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/javacto/

Please see the "How To use JavacTo.pdf" part of the download package for more information.

This tool is designed to explore the challenges faced in translating from one language to another. For example what type of code is suitable for auto-translation and what code will required complete rewrite? What level of automation can be expected? What java packages should be translated and what packages can be skipped? Are helper classes a good approach in bridging java to other language specific features? These are just a few questions that I've been working on as I've been writing this tool.

I think JavacTo is a good starting point for people who are interested in this topic.

IMHO moving java opensource projects to D has the potential to be an incredible win for the D language/community.


Patrick

On 2017-07-10 03:52, Patrick wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I'm pleased to announce a new java prototype application that is designed to translate java source into D source. Or any other language that support package, class, interface, and enum constructs and provides a built in memory garbage collection. Supporting D with JavacTo was my first choice!
> 
> JavacTo available at:
> https://sourceforge.net/projects/javacto/

Interesting. I'm working on a similar tool, to translate Java code to D [1]. It's written in Scala and uses the Eclipse JDT library to parse the Java code.

[1] https://github.com/d-widget-toolkit/jport/tree/dev

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

On Monday, 10 July 2017 at 01:52:51 UTC, Patrick wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm pleased to announce a new java prototype application that is designed to translate java source into D source. Or any other language that support package, class, interface, and enum constructs and provides a built in memory garbage collection. Supporting D with JavacTo was my first choice!
>
> [...]

Patrick this looks promising and very useful for anyone working with legacy java code and wanting to get into Dlang codebase - will dig into it as soon as i get some time. thanks for posting this..

- p.

On Monday, 10 July 2017 at 08:22:16 UTC, Jacob Carlborg wrote:

> Interesting. I'm working on a similar tool, to translate Java code to D [1]. It's written in Scala and uses the Eclipse JDT library to parse the Java code.
>
> [1] https://github.com/d-widget-toolkit/jport/tree/dev

Jacob - as with Patrick's posting - this looks useful for anyone working with legacy java code that needs/ or wants to migrate to D. Though less familiar with Scala, will certainly take a look as i get time to test further.

Thanks much for posting.

p.

On 2017-07-11 21:52, Phillip wrote:

> Jacob - as with Patrick's posting - this looks useful for anyone working with legacy java code that needs/ or wants to migrate to D. Though less familiar with Scala, will certainly take a look as i get time to test further.
> 
> Thanks much for posting.

My plan is to automate the porting of SWT to D (DWT [1]). This has currently been done manually. Hopefully the tool can port the JDT library as well. Then I can port the tool itself to D. Then we would have a Java compiler and a tool to translate Java to D, all written in D :)

[1] http://github.com/d-widget-toolkit/dwt

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

On Wednesday, 12 July 2017 at 07:47:48 UTC, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> My plan is to automate the porting of SWT to D (DWT [1]). This has currently been done manually. Hopefully the tool can port the JDT library as well. Then I can port the tool itself to D. Then we would have a Java compiler and a tool to translate Java to D, all written in D :)

I thought the guy who originally worked on DWT actually wrote a Java-to-D translator??

On 2017-07-12 18:22, Dejan Lekic wrote:

> I thought the guy who originally worked on DWT actually wrote a Java-to-D translator??

It depends on what you mean with "originally". There's an old port of SWT 3.0.2 that was for Windows only. This port was not entirely API compatible, IIRC. Then a new port of SWT 3.4.x was created by Frank Beniot [1] that supports both Windows and Linux. The ported source code tries to be as close to the original Java code as possible. This has been updated to D2 and it's the port I'm currently maintaining [2].

He also wrote a tool called Tioport to automatically port Java code to D. It's based one some form of XML documents IIRC. This was eventually stalled because he was not satisfied with the result [3].

The tool I'm working on now, JPort [4], is written in Scala and uses the Eclipse JDT compiler library. The aim is not, at least not first, to be able to port arbitrary Java projects to D. The main focus is to have SWT automatically ported. Then hopefully JDT itself, so the tool can be rewritten in D. I might add specific logic for SWT if that's needed. I think I have a much bigger chance to get this working by using a proper compiler.

[1] http://dsource.org/projects/dwt
[2] https://github.com/d-widget-toolkit
[3] http://dsource.org/projects/tioport/wiki/project_stalled
[4] https://github.com/d-widget-toolkit/jport/tree/dev

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg