Lame question 343242#

Has anyone written a c++ to d converter (I'm not talking about wrapping a lib, I'm talking about the syntax)?  I'm not volunteering however I was thinking if it was made easier to convert c++ to d people may be more likely to switch over.

If not I'm sure it would be a challenge however if it could do 90% of the work (and perhaps even automatically download the dependent libraries from a webpage and convert stl over to d's form) people would be able to say, "hay I converted our project to d on the weekend, its 50% in code size and runs just as fast, why don't we switch over and improve our productivity."  Well thats a just a dream, but it would help I think.

Legacy code is the biggest hurdle in getting D widely accepted.  No-one is going re-invent years of work.

-Joel

On Mon, 04 Dec 2006 22:19:13 -0800, janderson <askme@me.com> wrote:

> Lame question 343242#
>
> Has anyone written a c++ to d converter (I'm not talking about wrapping a lib, I'm talking about the syntax)?  I'm not volunteering however I was thinking if it was made easier to convert c++ to d people may be more likely to switch over.
>
> If not I'm sure it would be a challenge however if it could do 90% of the work (and perhaps even automatically download the dependent libraries from a webpage and convert stl over to d's form) people would be able to say, "hay I converted our project to d on the weekend, its 50% in code size and runs just as fast, why don't we switch over and improve our productivity."  Well thats a just a dream, but it would help I think.
>
> Legacy code is the biggest hurdle in getting D widely accepted.  No-one is going re-invent years of work.
>
> -Joel


Just curious, are you the Joel Anderson from Australia that was active on this list a couple of years ago?

-JJR

janderson wrote:
> Lame question 343242#
> 
> Has anyone written a c++ to d converter (I'm not talking about wrapping a lib, I'm talking about the syntax)?  I'm not volunteering however I was thinking if it was made easier to convert c++ to d people may be more likely to switch over.

I don't think that anyone has created such a tool (yet). The closest thing that I can think of is BCD (http://www.dsource.org/projects/bcd), but I guess it creates bindings from .h files rather than converting C/C++.

I've heard that some great strides have been made in automating conversion of Java to D. But C++ can get much more complex, so trying to automate conversion could be a lot more hazardous.

> If not I'm sure it would be a challenge however if it could do 90% of the work (and perhaps even automatically download the dependent libraries from a webpage and convert stl over to d's form) people would be able to say, "hay I converted our project to d on the weekend, its 50% in code size and runs just as fast, why don't we switch over and improve our productivity."  Well thats a just a dream, but it would help I think.
> 
> Legacy code is the biggest hurdle in getting D widely accepted.  No-one is going re-invent years of work.

-- 
jcc7

janderson wrote:
> Lame question 343242#
> 
> Has anyone written a c++ to d converter (I'm not talking about wrapping a lib, I'm talking about the syntax)?  I'm not volunteering however I was thinking if it was made easier to convert c++ to d people may be more likely to switch over.

Currently, the best we've got is htod, which will convert C header files to D import files.

Lame dream of mine:

Someone buys me http://www.semanticdesigns.com/Products/DMS/DMSToolkit.html?Home=SoftwareTransformation

and I get to work.

 - Paul

On Mon, 04 Dec 2006 22:19:13 -0800, janderson <askme@me.com> wrote:

>Legacy code is the biggest hurdle in getting D widely accepted.  No-one is going re-invent years of work.

Someone should take a look at TXL and see what it can do.

I got the link from http://www.cs.queensu.ca/~thurston/ragel/ where I've been getting all excited over the Ragel FSM / Scanner tool, and to a degree also the Kelbt parser generator, but this guy has also developed an extended TXL.

I don't have any understanding of what it does beyond the vague sense that it can do intelligent computer-language translation tasks, but that is enough of a hint that it might be able to do the job, and as a bonus it is available for free.

Even with a specialised tool, though, converting any meaningful subset of C++ to D automatically is going to be a tough job. Things that look similar actually have substantially different semantics.

-- 
Remove 'wants' and 'nospam' from e-mail.

Paul Findlay wrote:
> Lame dream of mine:
> 
> Someone buys me http://www.semanticdesigns.com/Products/DMS/DMSToolkit.html?Home=SoftwareTransformation
> 
> 
> and I get to work.
> 
>  - Paul

IIRC, the Language Machine is similar, but it's open-source, free, and written in D.

http://www.dsource.org/projects/languagemachine

BA

> 
> Just curious, are you the Joel Anderson from Australia that was active on this list a couple of years ago?
> 
> -JJR


The same one.  I'm now in San Francisco working for a game company called Perpetual.

-Joel Anderson

Brad Anderson wrote:
> Paul Findlay wrote:
>> Lame dream of mine:
>>
>> Someone buys me
>> http://www.semanticdesigns.com/Products/DMS/DMSToolkit.html?Home=SoftwareTransformation
>>
>>
>> and I get to work.
>>
>>  - Paul
> 
> IIRC, the Language Machine is similar, but it's open-source, free, and written
> in D.
> 
> http://www.dsource.org/projects/languagemachine
> 
> BA
>

This is neat.  I'll be sure to keep an eye on its development.

-Joel

janderson wrote:
> Brad Anderson wrote:
>> Paul Findlay wrote:
>>> Lame dream of mine:
>>>
>>> Someone buys me http://www.semanticdesigns.com/Products/DMS/DMSToolkit.html?Home=SoftwareTransformation
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> and I get to work.
>>>
>>>  - Paul
>>
>> IIRC, the Language Machine is similar, but it's open-source, free, and
>> written
>> in D.
>>
>> http://www.dsource.org/projects/languagemachine
>>
>> BA
>>
> 
> This is neat.  I'll be sure to keep an eye on its development.
> 
> -Joel

It's pretty mature, so I don't think it's under active development.  Peri Hankey maintains it, and will help you out if you ask.  He did a bunch of work on a Java to D converter a few months back.

BA