On Wed, 23 Jun 2010, Christopher Selph wrote:
Hi everyone, new here. I have been fooling around with the idea of porting WIne to the D programming language. What do you think would be the chances of sucess? D has the speed of C, but is a garbage collected language and OOP.
Garbage collecting:
Wine has strong requirements as far as the memory layout is concerned. Some applications don't expect to receive pointers to data above 3GB for instance. Windows also provides heap management routines and Windows applications create heaps, allocate memory inside them and don't expect things to move around. I suspect none of this would play well with garbage collecting. It would probably still be possible to use the garbage collector for a small fraction of Wine's allocations, but it seems to me that there would not be much point.
OOP:
A lot of the Windows API is exported through DLL entry points and these are not object oriented. Where the Windows API is object oriented is: * For some msvcrt parts. But the name of the corresponding C++ functions must be mangled in the Visual C++ way which probably does not match the D way. So we would still need to do the impedance adaptation in the spec file. * For COM objects. However these must have a very specific binary layout for compatibility with Windows applications. Again I doubt D objects would naturally generate the right datastructures. So you'd need to add an impedance adaptation just like for C.
Wine also has very strong requirements with regards to threading, CPU register usage, exception handling, all of which require very low-level control which negates the advantages high level languages might have in these areas.