dud: A dub replacement

[Rémy Mouëza]

On Monday, 25 November 2019 at 19:48:46 UTC, GreatSam4sure wrote:
> On Monday, 25 November 2019 at 18:28:55 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>> On Mon, Nov 25, 2019 at 12:15:42PM +0000, Joseph Rushton 
>> Wakeling via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote: [...]
>>> [...]
>>
>> I'm probably not the intended audience here, but just so it's 
>> out there, here's a list of dub showstoppers for me:
>>
>> [...]
>
>
> I am interested in D/java project. Can you help me with 
> material or link on that. I Will be happy to use javafx as 
> front end and D as back end for a desktop App.
>
> I have looking on GraalVm but no luck yet. Just need a good 
> tutorial for a start-up

I once got a php/D bridge proof of concept, that should have 
worked with Java as well:
- create some D utility code,
- make an extern (C) API,
- write the C headers of the API,
- use swig (http://www.swig.org/) to wrap the C API to the 
language of choice.
- Once loaded, the module has to initialize the D runtime, by a 
call to core.runtime.rt_init() or 
core.runtime.Runtime.initialize() 
(https://dlang.org/phobos/core_runtime.html).

Swig generates shared objects. This worked well on Linux. I am 
not sure how the dll support is on Windows though: it could get 
more difficult.

Back then, the extern (C++) wasn't as extensive as it is now, so 
today it might be more pertinent to create an extern (C++) API to 
conveniently wrap extern (C++) D classes/interfaces to Java 
classes/interfaces.

These pages of the documentation detail how to interface with C 
and C++:
https://dlang.org/spec/interfaceToC.html
https://dlang.org/spec/cpp_interface.html

Maybe the extern (C/C++) API approach can be used with GraalVM, I 
haven't researched that yet. When I tried GraalVM (for ahead of 
time native compilation) I got into difficulties with libraries 
using the java reflection API. One need to get the "pro" GraalVM 
distribution if I recall correctly. It seemed too much of a 
hurdle for what I was evaluating. I did eventually did fine 
without GraalVM.

The C/C++ API from D process is quite involving. If I were to get 
Java and D together I would explore a D server communicating with 
a Java client over a TCP socket or HTTP, maybe using json:
- Adam D. Ruppe wrote a D socket tutorial not long ago: 
https://forum.dlang.org/post/ciiiskgfeyhqfkfuxdai@forum.dlang.org
- I used asdf (http://code.dlang.org/packages/asdf) for JSON 
serialization and deserialization with success. There is also 
std.json already available in phobos.
- Maybe a small http server with vibe.d could be started with 
even less code.

For a desktop app, I would rather use dlangui 
(http://code.dlang.org/packages/dlangui). There are other 
maintained GUI libraries for D.

Ron Tarrant has written many tutorials an GtkD on his blog page:
- https://gtkdcoding.com/
- http://code.dlang.org/packages/gtk-d

There is also DWT, a D port of the SWT Java GUI library: 
http://code.dlang.org/packages/dwt

TKD is a binding over the Tcl/Tk toolkit:
- http://code.dlang.org/packages/tkd