"Stop Designing Languages. Write Libraries Instead."

[rumbu]

On Friday, 3 May 2019 at 02:25:47 UTC, Mike Franklin wrote:
>
> I program mostly in C#, and I can build things quite quickly in 
> it, not because it's a great language, but because of the .Net 
> Framework and its huge list of class libraries.  Take away the 
> .Net Framework, and C# loses much of its appeal.  I've often 
> wanted to write a shim from D to the .Net class libraries just 
> so I can use the .Net API from D.  I think others might even 
> currently be working on such a thing.  What would be even 
> better would be to write a tool that can automatically 
> translate the .Net Framework class libraries to D, perhaps 
> built on top of Phobos, to achieve platform abstraction.

Tried this [1], but there is a lot of stuff missing from Phobos 
to replicate 1:1 the .Net Framework. From what I remember, these 
were the challenges:
- culture sensitive string is a first class citizen of .net 
framework. This involves Unicode comparisons, normalization and 
all the ugly stuff you can find in std.uni;
- decimal data type is a built-in numeric type; I created my own 
decimal implementation [2]
- the .net framework Console is a beast compared to the phobos 
which simply calls the C library to write something on the screen 
which results in a lot of problems (that you cannot use a 
different decimal separator)
- again, culture sensitive info is missing from phobos (and I'm 
not referring to strings here). You cannot have a decent calendar 
or time zone information.

In fact the main problem is that .net classes are highly 
interconnected, and you cannot jut write one class without 
digging in another 1000. Just implementing a simple toString 
functionality will lead to string management, which will lead to 
unicode, which will lead to culture information for formatting 
and so on...

[1] https://github.com/rumbu13/sharp/tree/master/src
[2] https://github.com/rumbu13/decimal/tree/master/src