BT

Facilitating the Spread of Knowledge and Innovation in Professional Software Development

Write for InfoQ

Topics

Choose your language

InfoQ Homepage News Source for the D.NET Compiler is Now Available

Source for the D.NET Compiler is Now Available

This item in japanese

D is a relatively new language that, like ObjectiveC, tries to address some of the more serious problems in C++. From our interview with Cristian Vlasceanu,

In many ways D encourages the "right" behavior. For example, in C and C++, if you write "int i;" the variable is uninitialized. To do the "right thing", the programmer needs to type extra keystrokes as in "int i = 0;" but D works the other way around: "int i;" safely sets the variable to a default value (that in this case is zero). To make it uninitialized you have to spend extra effort and type "int i = void;" expressing that the uninitialized variable is intentional and not due to laziness.

D.NET is an experimental port of the D language to the Common Language Runtime. It consists of two parts, a front-end and a back-end component. The front-end component handles the parsing of source code and the generation of abstract syntax trees. The back-end compiler takes that and generates the actual machine code, or in this case IL code. While the source for both are available on CodePlex, only the back-end is maintained there. The front-end component is straight out of the D 2.0 Programming Language Compiler.

A word of caution,

The back-end code is not of production quality, it is intended for research and educational purposes. The D Programming Language is a fairly complex language, and non-trivial features such as TLS and closures make it an interesting case study for generating IL code.

Rate this Article

Adoption
Style

BT