Windows 8 Metro support

[Michel Fortin]

On 2012-04-09 16:39:30 +0000, Sönke Ludwig <sludwig at outerproduct.org> said:

> Right now, if we don't catch up here, D will slowly degrade to a pure 
> server and command line application language which surely wouldn't do 
> it justice.

I share your feeling. In fact, I'm not using D anywhere right now 
because it'd be too inconvenient for what I do most of the time.

> Another such thing - although this can be worked around - would be 
> direct support for Objective-C classes like in Michel Fortin's dmd 
> modification. I think these GUI application related functionalities are 
> by far the most important things for D's mass adoption.

And the reason GUI apps are so important is because they're the front 
end of most back ends. If using D on the back end makes it harder to 
build the user interface because of the language barrier, then that's a 
huge downside to using D on the back end of any project where the goal 
includes a user interface. For me at least, C++ is much better choice 
for the backend of a GUI app at the moment mostly it intermixes easily 
with Objective-C.

> And personally, I would even be willing to donate a (for me) 
> considerable amount of money to help bringing this forward because many 
> things I would like to realize with D are currently (almost) impossible.

I started the D/Objective-C project, patching DMD, because after a huge 
attempt at making a bridge I found out it wasn't going to cut it. The 
need for an intermediate layer at the language level is a huge 
liability: it costs compilation time, slows down the program, bloats 
the executable size, and it increases the memory footprint.

The problem is that D/Objective-C still needs a huge investment in 
development time to become really useful. It's more a proof of concept 
as it is now. The most important blocks have been shown to work, but 
the difficulty lies in getting all the details/variants right, 
integrating with the GC, automatic reference counting, Apple's Modern 
runtime, ARM, etc.

I'd love to take your money to free some of my time so I can continue 
working on this project. But I'm not too confident it will ever reach a 
satisfactory state without a huge time investment on my part. And I 
can't spare that investment myself, hence why the project is stalled.

As for WinRT and the C++ extensions Microsoft has created for it, it 
looks very similar to what I've been doing to integrate Objective-C 
into D. No doubt my work could be reused to also add similar WinRT 
support.

-- 
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.com
http://michelf.com/