[OT] Leverage Points

[Laeeth Isharc]

On Monday, 20 August 2018 at 12:26:25 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
> On Monday, 20 August 2018 at 11:55:33 UTC, Joakim wrote:

>>>> Finally, regarding leverage, I keep pointing out that mobile 
>>>> has seen a resurgence of AoT-compiled native languages, but 
>>>> nobody seems to be trying D out in that fertile terrain, 
>>>> other than me.
>>>
>>> I did try, but it's not exactly easy to make a complete app 
>>> in D, even on Android.  It would be great if there were some 
>>> way to automatically wrap the APIs.
>>
>> Right now, the Android port is more suited for writing some 
>> performant libraries that run as part of an existing Android 
>> app. The kind of polish you're looking for will only come with 
>> early adopters pitching in to smooth out those rough edges.
>
> If we had autowrap for JNI and could dump the types and method 
> prototypes as part of the pre-build process, what would the 
> next stage be to be able to just call Android APIs from D and 
> have them work?  JNI isn't that bad (I know it's deprecated) 
> and I used it already from D in a semi-wrapped way.  So I 
> wonder how much more work it would be to have autowrap for JNI.
>  I didn't use reflection on the Java side because I wasn't 
> wrapping that much code.  Are there XML descriptions of Android 
> APIs you could use to generate wrappers?

For example, could we make something like this for D?
https://github.com/opencollab/giws
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIWS_(software)

The above requires the user to specify the types in XML, but I 
guess you can dump them via reflection.
I have done some work on wrapping given the types in the internal 
code below (which won't build by itself).  It was written in a 
hurry and I didn't know Java, D, or JNI very well at the time:

https://github.com/kaleidicassociates/import-java-d