Reasons to use D

[via Digitalmars-d]

On Saturday, 12 September 2015 at 20:03:09 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe 
wrote:
> That's basically what my D->JS thing did back in 2011.

Nice, so now you will do it again in 2016 ? ;)

> That actually worked somewhat well in my dtojs but it was a 
> mild hassle too once function callbacks got more involved. You 
> can template them in D but then it bloats the generated JS for 
> no real reason since they all have identical dynamically typed 
> code!

Yes, you need to convert the D into a JS-specific IR and then fix 
it in an optimization step before code gen.

But function overloading isn't enough, unless you accept casting, 
since javascript can return anything. I guess you can use 
template parameters when you request literal strings like 
«document.createElement("div")», but in other situations it might 
be more tricky. I don't think function overloading is enough if 
you want to avoid casting.

But the TypeScript definition files might make it somewhat 
easier, and might be a good starting point as they expose typing 
issues. I don't think they are too hard to parse partially:

https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/blob/master/lib/lib.core.es6.d.ts
https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/blob/master/lib/lib.es6.d.ts
https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/blob/master/lib/lib.dom.d.ts
etc

Although I think one  should only include what browsers have in 
common. So it is a tedious job that probably involves writing a 
test program that test what different browsers support and upload 
results to a web server...

> I suppose that is solvable too but i never got around to it and 
> just went back to writing normal javascript. (I write small JS 
> files anyway, it is an ok language for small scripts.)

It's ok if you only write a few hundred lines of javascript, but 
the IDE code completion you get with typing really makes a 
difference.