Getting back into translating the Win32 headers - anyone?

[Stewart Gordon]

Not long ago (read: three months ago), there was a thread here to the
effect that this effort to translate the Windows API headers had gone quiet.

http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/announce/4605.html
http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?WindowsAPI

However, activity since then has continued to be minimal.  Can anyone
hazard a guess at why?  I can't....

The good news is that I've recently got an Internet connection set up on
the PC I do my D programming on.  Despite being broadband through a
router, it's intermittent, but at least I've got it at all.  And I've
even got Subversion working!  So no longer will I have to zip up my
updates and upload them to my website.  I guess I ought to remove the
link to my zip edition from the wiki page....

I'm working on implementing the status scheme proposed by Don Clugston:

- Initial conversion, but with sections commented out -- fixme
- Initial conversion with basic functionality -- compiles
- Fully functional (including versioning, pragma(lib)) -- alpha
- Polished -- beta


There are a few open issues that I feel still need to be addressed:

1. Should having the types of all constants (where available) be a
prerequisite for counting as "fully functional", and therefore having
alpha status?  Or is this something for the beta stage?  I suppose it 
depends on whether you consider the difference between alpha and beta to 
be purely cosmetic issues.

2. Which should be the default - winsock or winsock2?  Don once wrote:

"I really think that Winsock2 should be the default, since it was
supported in Win95. It was definitely included in Win95 B and C. It's
possible that Winsock2 might not have been included in the original
Win95 release, but any such computers with networks connections would be
immediately wiped out by viruses if they've never been upgraded to
Winsock2. We can be confident that there are no Win95 PCs that want to
use Winsock1. Winsock1 is a 16-bit technology, I doubt that any D
programs will ever use it. -- Don"

What does everybody else think?  If nobody disagrees or gets there
first, I'll change Winsock2 to be the default.

3. When should imports be public, and when should they be private?

(a) If the whole point of a module is to import other modules, then
obviously the imports have to be public.
(b) If qwert.h doesn't include yuiop.h, but yuiop.d is required for
qwert.d to compile, then the import should be private.
(c) This leaves the general case where a C header includes another.

Should we make imports of kind (c) public or private?  Moreover, should
we declare (b) and (c) imports using "private import" or simply "import"?

4. There seem to be a few ways of doing the variable-length structs in use.

     struct MIB_IPADDRTABLE {
         DWORD            dwNumEntries;
         MIB_IPADDRROW[1] _table;

         MIB_IPADDRROW* table() { return _table.ptr; }
     }

or

     struct MIB_IPADDRTABLE {
         DWORD         dwNumEntries;
         MIB_IPADDRROW _table;

         MIB_IPADDRROW* table() { return &_table; }
     }

or (merely proposed, I don't think used yet)

     struct MIB_IPADDRTABLE {
         DWORD         dwNumEntries;
         MIB_IPADDRROW _table;

         MIB_IPADDRROW[] table() { return (&_table)[0..dwNumEntries]; }
     }

Which should we settle with?  I personally think the proposed idea is a
good one.  Just as the C headers make use of C's lack of ABC, so the D
translation would make use of D's ABC.  Look also at the idea for custom
allocators for these things on the discussion page of the wiki.

5. I've noticed that bit field setters have variously, depending on who
coded them up, been declared to return void or to return the value
passed in.  Is there any reason to have them returning void?  We ought
to make these consistent.

6. In many modules, class IDs defined externally in a library are being
declared without the const attribute.  Is there some reason for this?
They're constants, so surely they should be declared as such.


We've less than 30 days to get it done and dusted if we're going to
submit a full translation for DMD 1.0.  Even better would be if it can
be got done by the time I go back to my immediate family for Christmas
around the 20th.  So come on guys!

Stewart.