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DConf 2019: Transcompilation into D -- Bastiaan Veelo

The D Language Foundation

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  • Presented by Bastiaan Veelo

Advanced. Deep dive for people who know the field.

585 views7 years ago2 recommendations

Programming languagesSystems programmingCompilers and interpretersLanguage design and type systems

Bastiaan Veelo discusses the challenges and strategies of translating 500,000 lines of Extended Pascal into D using a custom transcompiler.

Slides available at dconf.org/2019/talks/veelo.html. SARC is an engineering company listed as one of the organisations using D. An important pillar of its business is the development of software for the maritime industry. Currently, its main D-related focus is to translate all of its 500KLOC of Extended Pascal into D using an in-house developed transcompiler. The transcompiler is purely developed using D tools, which was the subject of my DConf 2017 talk. SARC's motivation for selecting D as its future language was presented on the D blog in 2018. This talk will present the proceedings of this particular transcompilation effort, discussing challenges and strategies, and the D language features that help to make the project a success.

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What people say. Recommended as an example of migrating a large legacy codebase to D.

u/aldacronin r/programming • Recommends

On “They wrote a Gas Dynamics Toolkit in D”

Every project and company has their own checklist of priorities for language choice. Popularity might not be one of them. Funkwerk switched from Java to D for their passenger information system running on several railways in Central Europe: https://dlang.org/blog/2017/07/28/project-highlight-funkwerk/. They did so in 2008 during the D1 days, and later migrated to D2. SARC switched their ship hull design software from Pascal to D and even developed a transpiler in D to aid them: see link to this video and link to this video I’m sure there are similar examples for other “niche” languages.
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u/_veeloin r/programming • Recommends

On “He Wrote a High-Frequency Trading Platform In D”

I got my workplace to accept that. I gave my thoughts on how to achieve this in my opening remarks to link to this video In short, if you want your employer to make a daring move like embracing a new language, I think it helps enormously if you can show that you yourself are prepared to take some risk and make investments towards that goal. Like implementing a proof of concept or an important corner stone. Dare leading the way. We are using D in production already for new applications, and nearing completion of translating all existing applications to D. We still have kinks to work out, but we’ll get there.
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