Surely the main requirements would be gui and networking? Which would be completely possible.
On Friday, 15 November 2013 at 08:50:14 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
On Friday, 15 November 2013 at 07:13:34 UTC, Jeremy DeHaan wrote:
Hey everyone!
I have been experimenting for the past couple of days with an idea I had, and since I recently made a little progress I thought I would share some of what I have been doing with you. What I have done, in a nutshell, is began the process for a language converter that takes D source files, converts them into Java source files, and then compiles them as Java class files so that they can be ran on Java's VM. It is extremely limited in what it can do right now, only being able to convert/compile a simple Hello World program, but I was proud of myself for getting even that far so I wanted to brag. :P
You may want to ask, "Hey, man. D is a great language. Why would I ever want to convert it to Java?" Normally, you wouldn't. Java blows. What I am envisioning for this project is something quite magical in my opinion. If we can take D code and have it compile into Java class files, we can then compile them into Android dex files. This would make D able to build and run on Android devices through its VM. Sure, people are working on getting D to compile to ARM binaries, but this could be another option as a Java alternative on Android.(eventually)
Unfortunately I do not know much about compilers, but even in the last couple of days I feel like I have learned a great deal about what kinds of stuff goes into them. Eventually I'd like to make a full blown compiler that takes D code and can go right to dex files, but that would be something that would happen way down the road. In order to get D working on Android sooner, I figured a language converter would be the easier route.
I can, and would love to go in to more detail about this, but it is getting late and this post is already quite long. Maybe I should start a blog about my D escapades? Anyways, I would love to hear feedback on this idea! Thanks for your time!
It is an impossible task, because many of the D semantics cannot be expressed in JVM/Dalvik bytecode.
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Paulo
Like what? Barring low-level device access, they are both turing complete languages and given the necessary transformations a complete program in one can always be statically* translated to the one in the other. However, efficient java code would be a different matter.
*very important. There are many code-level concepts in D that are not expressible in the JVM, but a static translation doesn't need to honor those: it simply needs to make a program that has the same observable effects for any given input. This is definitely possible, although quite possibly monstrously involved when done in detail.