How to use D for cross platform development?

[Michel Fortin]

On 2012-03-29 16:36:55 +0000, Jacob Carlborg <doob at me.com> said:

> Both I and Michel have created an Objective-C/D bridge that uses this 
> approach. It lets you call Objective-C methods, create instances of 
> Objective-C classes, create subclasses in D that inherit from 
> Objective-C classes and so on. It did this all automatically. The 
> problem with the bridge was the enormous template bloat. A GUI Hello 
> World application takes around 60MB with the bridge.
> 
> http://www.dsource.org/projects/dstep
> http://michelf.com/projects/d-objc-bridge/

All true.

The tricky thing with Objective-C is that you need to subclass 
Objective-C classes to make use of Cocoa. It's that mechanism that let 
you create a "D subclass" of a Objective-C class that is so 
heavyweight, and also not very efficient. Just calling Objective-C code 
is relatively easy in D if you don't need to subclass, but it won't 
take you very far.

> That's why Michel started the DMD fork to directly support binding to 
> Objective-C classes and methods.

Indeed. And the approach makes much more sense. Only I don't really 
have time for compiler hacking these days. I still hope I'll be able to 
continue it later this year.


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