Following my previous post about new opportunities for D with ASM.js,
I've caught up with a lot of reading about Dart after seeing the
seriousness of the project and a virtual machine being integrated to
chrome directly. The benchmarks are already very promising[1]
My position has changed, and I now think D would be in a better position
if it ran in the Dart VM. In other words, ASM.js has become the Dart
language - the solution is to introduce a D to Dart compiler[2]. This
compiler would be written in D with Pegged, the same way I'm writing
this ASN.1 compiler[3]
This would require the interfaces from the Dart libraries (front-end DOM
objects) to be built into a D library. Of course, the D=>Dart compiler
would need to handle druntime and phobos as well for complete
integration. I don't think this task is half as complicated as it would
have been to go the D=>LLVM=>ASM.js route.
The best part of it all is this: you can compile the back-end
(server-side) code to a binary executable using vibe.d and achieve
immense performance improvements vs what runs in the Dart VM, and send
the front-end code to Dart. This obviously seems like a durable and
promising opportunity.
Comments?
[1] https://www.dartlang.org/performance/
[2] https://www.dartlang.org/articles/why-not-bytecode/#compiling-to-source
[3] https://github.com/globecsys/asn1.d
