Trying to make dali compatible with jnim

[akavel]

I'm trying to build some infrastructure to allow writing Android apps (.apk) in pure Nim, with no requirement for Android Studio or JVM installation. I'm interested in making it compatible with jnim as much as possible, to avoid duplication of effort. To give some quick overview:

• An introductory post on Nim forum from May, describing the fist PoC of the "dali" project.
• Since then, most importantly I added some macros, named classes_dex and dclass, which make some parts of the experience much more user-friendly — they're roughly speaking similar to your jexport macro IIUC.
• There's also basic support for writing native methods in Nim.

However, I'd be generally super interested in making it as much compatible with jnim as possible. For example, I think it would be great for users of dali, if they could easily use some features you already implemented in jexport, such as super etc., when writing {.native.} methods in dali. But I don't know jnim well enough to understand if/how this can be possible. Do you have some ideas how I could try to approach making my package compatible with jnim in the best way?

I will probably have more similar things in dali that I'd love to talk through in future, if you'd be interested in some discussion/cooperation between the two projects. I'm dreaming of a future, where people could e.g. use dali seamlessly and invisibly to write apps in nimx for Android, etc. I'd be happy to make dali a backend for jnim/nimx/... in some way. But I don't understand your awesome projects well enough to be able to do it on my own, so I'd be very happy if you would fancy helping me with this a bit! I'm also open to building stuff separately, it's just that I'm feeling reinventing the wheel here sounds like a huge waste of effort.

What do you think?

[yglukhov]

Awesome! Pinging you on gitter...

[akavel]

I should be available there in some 1.5h