D compiler for .NET

[Bill Baxter]

On Wed, Jun 10, 2009 at 2:12 PM, Jason House<jason.james.house at gmail.com> wrote:
> Daniel Keep Wrote:
>
>> "The back-end code is not of production quality, it is intended for
>> research and educational purposes. The D Programming Language is a
>> fairly complex language, and non-trivial features such as TLS and
>> closures make it an interesting case study for generating IL code."
>
> I played around a bit more and it looks like D standard libraries don't compile and there's no access to any .NET libraries. There's a hack to give access to objects in System such as System.Console. I was able to use that to make hello world work. It's useless for my goals. There's no way I could use it at work :(

As I was reading about C++/CLI recently, it made me wonder whether
that might be a better model to follow to bring D to .NET.  C++/CLI is
a managed .NET langauge, but it also interfaces seamlessly with native
C++ code.   It introduces a bit of new syntax on top of C++ so that
the managed classes and native classes can coexist.   For instance
"ref class Foo {...}" declares a class that will be managed by the
.NET VM.  "class Foo { ... }" remains as it is in C++, a native code
class.

Clearly it would be cool if all existing D code could be made to just
run unaltered on top of .NET, but this may be too much to hope for
given that D was designed to down-to-the-metal, and .NET was not
designed to host such langauges.

--bb