GWT clone

[Mathias Laurenz Baumann]

> Question: as someone who has never used either of the engines that you  
> reference, do they actually perform impl language -> JS conversions?

GWT does that for sure. Webtoolkit has a different approach, something  
along stateless slots. It kinda records what the serverside does and  
rebuilds that behavior in javascript.


> Sounds like an absolutely enormous job. Assuming you had a working d  
> parser and semantic analyzer (and in-depth understanding of its inner  
> workings), it could probably be done in less than six months (as long as  
> the language it was written in doesn't *cough* suck).


Do you think I need such a deep understanding? Couldn't I just choose to  
support a certain subset of D and do only more simple conversation without  
in-depth analysis and all this?


--Marenz


Am 22.05.2010, 21:15 Uhr, schrieb Ellery Newcomer  
<ellery-newcomer at utulsa.edu>:

> On 05/22/2010 01:19 PM, Mathias Laurenz Baumann wrote:
>> Greetings,
>>
>> I want to write a web-library/framework, similar to [1]Webtoolkit or
>> [2]GWT.
>> For that I need to transform a sub portion of D code to javascript.
>> Additionally, I dislike changing the toolchain, which means it has all
>> to happen at the
>> compilation time.
>> I want to know what you think about the following possibilities and
>> whether you know better ones.
>>
>> a)
>> Write a compile-time template based parser for D to JS code and parse
>> the .d files and transform them
>> b)
>> write a initialization-time parser for D to JS code, to access the D
>> code, each to-be-converted file
>> needs to have its own code as string, like char[] src = __FILE__;
>>
>

>
> Currently, I believe there is only one semantic analyzer for D on the  
> planet: the dmd front end. Use it as is, use Ary's port, use Denis'  
> port. (a) is not an option in this case, unless you want to spend most  
> of forever porting the dmd front end to compile time evaluatable D.
>
> And you will have to support the entire D language if by toolchain you  
> mean you want access to the routines in phobos or tango or whatever. (If  
> not, then I don't see the point of converting your D code to JS  
> mechanically.) And then you're going to have to deal with things like  
> extern(C), which are all over the place in both libraries, which I  
> suspect is nontrivial or not possible.
>
> So unless I've misunderstood something, I don't think avoiding JS is  
> really worth all the effort. Sorry for being a pessimist.
>