OT: Started a blog about D, OpenGL and SDL

[Mike Parker]

Anders F Björklund wrote:
> Mike Parker wrote:

> On Win32 and MacOS, SDL does a little trickery before the real main
> by redefining "main" with a macro (!) that will call a SDL function:
> 
> /* The application's main() function must be called with C linkage,
>    and should be declared like this:
> #ifdef __cplusplus
> extern "C"
> #endif
>         int main(int argc, char *argv[])
>         {
>         }
>  */
> #define main    SDL_main
> 
> /* The prototype for the application's main() function */
> extern C_LINKAGE int SDL_main(int argc, char *argv[]);

Exactly. I believe this was the original intent of SDL_main, but it got 
cluttered with other garbage as well.

> 
> This "SDL_main" does some SDL setup, and then calls the real "main"
> with the arguments filtered (as some arguments are handled by SDL)
> 
> For Win32 you can fake this SDL_main by reproducing it in D, but
> for the regular MacOS driver it is written in Objective-C (not C)...

For Win32, you can just skip it completely. I have a C framework I put 
together that uses SDL and doesn't even link in SDL_main. That's why 
DerelictSDL has no issues on Windows. All SDL_main does there is 
redirect stdout & stderr, call SDL_Init with the NO_PARACHUTE flag, and 
call ddhelp.exe for some reason, all of which can be done without.

I looked over the Mac version of SDL_main a while ago, but I didn't 
really grok it. What exactly does it do that is required to run an SDL 
app? Why can we not do without it on Mac? That's what I'm curious about.