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WIP.md

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Work In Progress

This package is a work in progress, and many details are subject to change.

Here is a long yet still very incomplete list of things we would like to do or improve:

  • Expressivity gaps:
    • Translate Java exceptions into Swift and vice versa
    • Expose Swift types to Java
    • Figure out when to promote from the local to the global heap
    • Automatically turn get/set method pairs into Swift properties?
    • Implement a global registry that lets us find the Swift type corresponding to a canonical Java class name (e.g., java.net.URL -> JavaKitNetwork.URL)
    • Introduce overloads of is and as on the Swift projections so that conversion to any implemented interface or extended superclass returns non-optional.
    • Figure out how to express the equivalent of super.foo() that calls the superclass's method from the subclass method.
    • Recognize Java's enum classes and map them into Swift well
    • Translate Java constants into Swift constants
    • Support nested classes
    • Streamline the definition of "main" code in Swift
    • Figure out how to subclass a Java class from Swift
  • Tooling
    • Extract documentation comments from Java and put them in the Swift projections
    • SwiftPM build plugin to generate the Swift projections from Java as part of the build
    • Figure out how to launch the Java runtime from Swift code so we don't need to always start via java
    • Figure out how to unit-test this framework using Swift Testing
    • Add a "Jar mode" to Java2Swift that translates all classes in the given Jar file.
    • Generate Swift projections for more common Java types into JavaKit libraries to make it easier to get started
    • Teach Java2Swift when to create extensions of already-translated types that pick up any members that couldn't be translated because of missing types. See, for example, how JavaKitReflection adds extensions to JavaClass based on types like Method and Parameter
  • Performance:
    • Cache method/field IDs when we can
    • Investigate noncopyable types to remove excess copies
    • Investigate "unbridged" variants of String, Array, etc.
    • Investigate the new Foreign Function & Memory API (aka Project Panama) for exposing Swift APIs to Java.