While working at now long-gone mobile game company Digital Chocolate, they developed their games using a pretty clever but also very complex process of writing the games in Java, then converting that Java to whatever the target mobile phone platform required.<p>For iPhone, which they arrived late to the party, the code was compiled with an tool built inhouse that converted the Java code to Objective-C++, with homemade garbage collection code. The end results were impressive from a standpoint of having the ability to target 50+ different devices at the time (when you still had J2ME phones on the market) but the performance was just not there for the iPhone, the games ran pretty poorly on that platform and ultimately I think that is one of the reasons they went bankrupt.<p>Still, the tech was quite fascinating, very difficult to debug and slow to compile. First you had to run the whole project through the Java -> Objective-C++ converter which took quite some time, and then you had to compile this huge Xcode project, in total I think it could take easily like 30-40 minutes just to get build. Debugging was a pain in the ass also, the code generated was not easy to read or very concise.<p>Wondering if they maybe used this tool ? When was this project started, any idea ?