On Thursday, 8 October 2015 at 18:29:00 UTC, Laeeth Isharc wrote:
It'd be nice to have asm.js or even JS.
Look at Adam Ruppe's D to JavaScript compiler. It hasn't been
maintained, but it was a very interesting experiment.
I wish there were more interest in having LDC generate JS via
LLVM a la emscripten. Some serious people think it's not that
difficult.
To be honest, rather than having IDEs and all the bells and
whistles (which started this thread), I'd prefer D to cater for
things like asm.js and ARM processors. Nim got it right in the
sense that it allows developers to write code and ship it to web
browsers and everything else that understands JS. Writing JS is a
pain in the "sit upon", being able to write code in a decent
language and have it output as JS is great. There's no way around
the web, i.e. JS.
@Ola
That said one has to be careful when looking at other languages
such as Go and Rust. I remember the VM fashion a couple of years
back (mainly Java and C#), but still languages that compile to
native code kept coming up and now everyone goes native,
including the VM supporters. Why? Cos it didn't work and
everybody working with Java realized that, it's too fookin slow.
How can we tell that Go is the way to go (pardon the pun)? Maybe
in a few years' time the thing to do will be library based memory
management. One of D's strengths is to be impervious to fashion
and to try to do what's right and what works. Ironically enough,
C++ is playing catch up with D. D might not get the credit that's
due, but D proves that certain concepts work better than others.
But who ever gives credit to the lab rats? :-)
