D 2.066 is out. Enjoy!

Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d-announce digitalmars-d-announce at puremagic.com
Thu Aug 21 13:43:51 PDT 2014


On Thursday, 21 August 2014 at 20:33:56 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 8/21/2014 11:54 AM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>> LOL. Yeah, well, it would be ni going to support C+ce if we 
>> could get an actual
>> list of the C++ features that D currently supports somewhere 
>> (and how to use
>> them if it's not obvious). You've been doing so much great 
>> work on that that I
>> have no clue what the current state of things is. For 
>> instance, this is the
>> first I've heard of anything about template support; I'd 
>> thought that we were
>> never going to support templates. Is it just for name mangling 
>> or for actually
>> compiling them?
>
> The thing is, while the code was there, there wasn't a single 
> test case for it in the test suite. Furthermore, at least for 
> Elf, there was no support for the special mangling done for 
> ::std:: stuff.
>
> The thing is, modern C++ practice makes heavy use of std types. 
> Having an interface to C++ code is fairly unusable unless D can 
> also interface to std::string, std::vector, and a few others.
>
> The first step is to support the mangling of them. Then, try to 
> construct a "workalike" on the D side that follows D rules, and 
> yet is able to seamlessly interact with the corresponding C++ 
> code.
>
> We'll see how far we can get with that, and then evaluate what 
> to do next.
>
> There are no plans for actually compiling C++ code with a D 
> compiler. The plan is for support like we do for C - have a .d 
> "header" file for it.

Well, I wouldn't have expected us to be compiling C++ per se, but 
previously, it seemed like the party line was that we wouldn't be 
supporting C++ templates at all because of how hard they were and 
because we don't want a C++ compiler in the D compiler. I'm 
certainly all for anything we can do for C++ compatability 
without going off the deep end. I just don't hear much about what 
we're actually doing right now. So, I really have no idea what 
the current status of that is. With what was said at dconf and 
comments like these, it seems like we're making huge progress in 
comparison to where we were, and as far as I can tell, about the 
only way to hear about it is to either pay a lot of attention to 
dmd pulls or to see an occasonal comment from Daniel talking 
about it or from someone who's paying close attention to what 
he's up to. So, at some point in the near future, it would be 
nice if there were somewhere that actually said what D can 
actually do with C++ now, even if that doesn't include everything 
that's going to be coming or if much of it is marked as 
experimental and relatively untested.

- Jonathan M Davis


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