ssll - simple shared library loader

[Mike Parker]

On Sunday, 5 January 2020 at 23:23:48 UTC, Oleg B wrote:

Nice work! One thing I would recommend, though, is that you not 
bake in extern(C). Some libraries require extern(System) (because 
they're stdcall on Windows and cdecl everywhere else).

There's also the issue with the Windows stdcall name-mangling 
scheme in 32-bit libraries, where the symbol name incorporates 
the size of the function parameters. Some stdcall libraries (like 
OpenGL) are configured to compile with the unmangled names, but 
others (like FreeImage) are not and require transforming the 
symbol name into the mangled form.

So to be robust, you'll want to implement support for both into 
SSLL.

> It's analog of bindbc, but without need write boilerplate code.
> May be bindbc is designed for another cases, but I don't 
> understand need writing triple definition for one function 
> (pointer, loading, wrap-function).

There are only two declarations required for the dynamic bindings 
in BindBC: an alias and a pointer. And of course the loader is 
separate. The reason is historical. When I was working on the 
earliest version of Derelict back in 2004, we didn't have all the 
fancy compile-time features we have now. I (and a couple of 
contributors) tried doing it by declaring the function pointers 
without aliases, but we ran into a couple of issues and settled 
for taking the alias + pointer approach. (It's been so long that 
I can't recall what the issues were).

In the 4th iteration of Derelict (the bindings in DerelictOrg on 
github), I experimented with UDAs and single function 
declarations that I could generate static and dynamic bindigs 
with. But I was still mixing in the alias and pointer 
declarations for the dynamic bindings and could never figure out 
a way to distinguish between them during introspection. I posted 
about it here on the forums and no one had an answer, so I gave 
up.

So bindbc is implemented the way it is because that's the way 
I've done it for almost 16 years.