SafeD & Java

[Jeremy Powers]

> In any case, while Java should be fairly easily converted to D automatically (at
> least as far as the language itself goes - not the libraries), I'm not aware of
> any project that's designed to do that.

What you describe is pretty close to the track that DWT(2) has taken -
porting SWT from Java by basically stubbing out the Java standard
library and then tweaking the Java source.

http://www.dsource.org/projects/dwt

There's also this project, though I don't know what state it is in:

http://www.dsource.org/projects/tioport




2010/7/7 Jonathan M Davis <jmdavisprog at gmail.com>:
> On Wednesday 07 July 2010 21:46:01 fantasticfears wrote:
>>  I know Java programs can be machine-translated into SafeD from
>> http://www.digitalmars.com/d/2.0/safed.html.
>> But what's the difference between SafeD and Java?
>
> SafeD is the safe subset of D. So, it disallows stuff like pointers, but most of
> the language qualifies as "safe," so asking what the difference between SafeD and
> Java pretty much amounts to asking what the difference between D and Java is, and
> since they're two separate languages, that's a fair bit. Now, for the most part,
> D has more than Java, so it would be easier to convert Java to D than the other
> way around (for instance, D has structs while Java doesn't, but they both have
> classes; so converting the Java classes to D classes would be fairly
> straightforward, but converting D structs to Java classes would not). Generally
> speaking, I think that a Java program will have pretty much the same semantics
> as D if you tried to compile it as D (though there are bound to be differences -
> like how they char types are totally different). The main problem that you're
> going to run into is that the libraries are completely different.
>
> So, while the language itself might convert quite easily, as soon as you're
> using the libraries (as you inevitably will be), you're going to have to figure
> out what libraries in D do the same thing, and given the size of Java's standard
> library, depending on what you're doing there's a good chance that you'd have to
> implement a fair bit of it yourself in D. D has some great library stuff, but
> it's nowhere near as complete as Java's libraries.
>
> In any case, while Java should be fairly easily converted to D automatically (at
> least as far as the language itself goes - not the libraries), I'm not aware of
> any project that's designed to do that.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis
>