Googling around, I found a tool that I think is one the coolest thing I've seen in a long while: http://xmlvm.org/overview/ If I understood correctly (haven't read the fine print yet) you can write an application in Java or .Net, and then cross compile it, so that the output is a python/C#/C++/&#106avascript, or an objective-C program. They even translate the Android API to iPhone API, so you can write an Android application and compile it into an iPhone application! I'm not sure how mature it is, but I leave it to someone with spare time to explore... Searching for xmlvm here in gamedev found zero results, and I thought it might interest you game developers out there so am posting this. Anyone tried it? Does it work? does it work smoothly? <!--EDIT--><span class=editedby><!--/EDIT-->[Edited by - Iftah on March 10, 2010 9:00:50 AM]<!--EDIT--></span><!--/EDIT-->

Quote: Original post by Iftah
Anyone tried it?
Does it work? does it work smoothly?

Yes, and kind of.

It's a neat idea, but it's not very mature at the moment. While their website makes all kinds of elaborate claims about transforming various languages into various other languages, in practice the only thing that works right now is Java->objective-C. More specifically, it's main aim at the moment is allowing people to write iPhone apps in Java. IIRC there are several published iPhone apps/games that are using this, including at least one which uses the same code base to produce iPhone and Android versions. Obviously it's not WORA but it's usable.

I was interested in Java->C#, however I found that this code path was horribly broken after a major bout of refactoring. After some hacking I managed to get it working and did cross-compile a "hello world" app, but that's as far as it goes. There's a certain amount of instruction translation working, but there's no compatibility library, so you can't do anything useful other than print to the console.

The response from the developers was basically "We don't care about the C# backend, why don't you write it yourself". :( Unfortunately I don't really have the time or the expertise to do that.