D Language Foundation October 2022 Quarterly Meeting Summary

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On 11/2/22 12:42 AM, Mike Parker wrote:
> Walter said that ImportC doesn't support head const. His experience with 
> C is that people generally mean const in C to be transitive. So in 
> ImportC, he turned the head const cases into transitive const and it 
> appears to work well.

On one of the only articles using ImportC (which otherwise shines a 
positive light on the feature), this specific issue is the only one that 
comes up as a blocker:

https://briancallahan.net/blog/20220704.html

Specifically in the "running make" part:

> There was one more file that DMD couldn't compile:
> 
> dmd -g -O -P=-DEMACS -P=-DVI -ofexpr.o -c expr.c
> expr.c(204): Error: cannot modify `const` expression `(*es).tok`
> expr.c(205): Error: cannot modify `const` expression `(*es).val`
> 
> I wonder if this is a bug in ImportC. No other C compiler we've tried fails on this code.

Having translated C code myself, and running into const issues where 
I've had to cast away const, I do not think this is a wise decision. 
Walter should reconsider. An ImportC that can't compile pretty standard 
C code as-is is nearly useless.

-Steve