D "Swing"

[Chris]

On Saturday, 29 December 2012 at 15:07:06 UTC, Jacob Carlborg 
wrote:
> On 2012-12-29 13:55, Chris wrote:
>
  problem with this bridge is bloat. A Hello World GUI
> application takes around 60MB in size. It's basically a dead 
> end.
>
> This is a better solution:
>
> http://michelf.ca/projects/d-objc/
>
> It adds support for extern (Objective-C), i.e. ABI 
> compatibility with Objective-C. Michel Fortin hasn't worked on 
> this for a couple of years but I have started to continue on 
> his work.

I've heard of this project but always had one problem or another 
with it. I agree that it is the better solution but I could never 
make it work properly (probably my own fault).

I agree that bridges are never a good solution (cf. the 
Cocoa-Java Bridge). I was thinking of a mechanism that isn't 
bloated, i.e. that only takes what it needs, if that's at all 
possible. I've succeeded in using ObjC from D (via D's C 
compatiblity) and it wasn't bloated. My idea is to call D from 
within a Cocoa application, so that Cocoa is only the interface 
layer. In the same way D could take care of the business logic on 
other platforms too and use a C based GUI having a thin 
"translation" layer between the two. It's not as smooth as having 
native bindings and a unified API like DWT, wxD etc. but it gives 
me freedom of choice and flexibility.

Btw, how does D fare with mobile phones? Are there issues with 32 
and 64 bit? The JavaScript backend (see post above) might come in 
handy here.