"Greg Vanore" <dazden@at.dazden.dot.org> wrote in message news:c8dtnl$29as$1@digitaldaemon.com...
> Like I said, the optimal scenario is targeting the JVM.  But it doesn't support delegates, and probably other language features of D (although as
of
> 1.5, it supports generics (templating)).

Much as I wish I was wrong, there's no practical way D can be brought to the JVM (for similar reasons as to why there are no C compilers targetting JVM). Java bytecodes are very specific to the semantics of Java, and have no capability of doing pointers, nested functions, or stack aggregates. It can't even do the full set of D's basic types. Of course, one could possibly implement a DVM in Java and then have D target the DVM, but I bet it would run 100 times slower than Java.

> Of course, we use Java at my office and not .NET so it's mostly moot, but still, more exposure for the language will ultimately be a good thing.  If we can achieve a transparent D ILASM compiler, then it ultimately doesn't matter.  You can recompile all your D libs to .NET and still use them
there,
> and your D code can be native or .NET.

ILASM is rich enough to support D.

Billy Zelsnack wrote:

>> JITs are getting better and better. But is MATLAB itself written in a JITted
>> language? is the Java vm written in Java? Is the Python vm written in
>> Python?
>>
>> That said, there is nothing preventing D code from being executed via a JIT
>> rather than a static compiler.
> 
> 
> I think as the language becomes more popular it is bound to happen. I bet within a year we'll see D in .NET CLR or as Java byte code. I am very excited about the possiblity. While I am blathering on, I'd also like to see a raw C or C++ backend for the D compiler. GCC as an option is really nice, but it really is not the fastest compiler around.

There's also LLVM: http://llvm.cs.uiuc.edu/

GCC can already output LLVM, so D should be able to target it already. (hypothetically)

 -- andy