Running D in the Java VM

Jeremy DeHaan dehaan.jeremiah at gmail.com
Wed Nov 20 08:42:56 PST 2013


On Sunday, 17 November 2013 at 05:49:43 UTC, John J wrote:
> On 11/15/2013 02:13 AM, Jeremy DeHaan wrote:
>> 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)
>
> My guess is, D will compile to ARM binaries sooner than you 
> could complete your D2Java project. Even if you could beat it 
> by an year, people would instantly switch to D -> ARM route the 
> moment it's available.
>
> If it should survive as an alternative, Jave should have some 
> more advantages over D, even after the D compiles to ARM.

Yeah, with ARM in development I wasn't sure if I should continue, 
which is one of the reasons I only got as far as I did. I 
remembered reading something about using native code for Android 
on the official site, which was something along the lines of "Use 
only for performance critical code, in most cases it won't help, 
blah blah blah" so I figured that this route should be fine in 
terms of performance and what not.

In any case, I have an event I have to organize coming up so I 
wouldn't be able to continue working on this until next year at 
the earliest. It was nice to get some feedback from people 
though. Maybe I'll post again if I have something that I can get 
to compile on Android. :P


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