Questions regarding D

[Denis Koroskin]

On Thu, 15 Jan 2009 00:17:30 +0300, Jarrett Billingsley <jarrett.billingsley at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 2:58 PM, William Newbery  
> <wnewbery at hotmail.co.uk> wrote:
>
>> 4)Support for directX: Specificaly I need to  be able to use d3d9,  
>> d3dx9, d3d10, d3dx10 and xAudio2.
>
> It's entirely possible.  D natively supports COM interfaces and the
> Windows calling convention, so it's really just a matter of porting
> the headers from C++.  There are ports of DirectX 9 and possibly 8
> (though that doesn't help you..) headers already.  The other small
> hurdle is linking against the DirectX DLLs - thankfully MS has put
> D3DX in a DLL of its own and you no longer have to deal with the
> static linking BS that used to be necessary.  More or less it's a
> matter of just using implib (comes with DMC, I think, or DMD) on the
> DLL with the /system flag and including the .def file it generates on
> the command line when you compile/link your program.
>
> I don't think anyone's taken a shot at porting the DX10 headers, so
> you'd be on your own there.
>

DX10 headers have been ported long ago:
http://dsource.org/projects/bindings/browser/trunk/win32/directx

>> 5)Support for classes in dynamic libaries, and the ability to  
>> dynamicaly load these libaries.
>
> You're on Windows, so no.  Well, for the most part, no.  SOs on Linux
> work perfectly.  DLLs on Windows are not sufficient for what D needs
> to do proper dynamic linking.  Namely, there are issues with TypeInfo
> - the runtime type information that the D runtime uses to perform all
> sorts of useful things, like throwing exceptions and sorting arrays
> and doing downcasts.  What ends up happening is that the RTTI is
> duplicated in both the EXE and the DLL, and the runtime does no
> stitching up or removing of redundancy in those situations, leading
> to.. odd behavior.  The GC and DLLs also have strange interactions -
> it's entirely possible to set up the GC to collect data inside the
> DLL, but unloading the DLL sometimes results in a segfault for reasons
> behind my understanding.
>
> You do have options.  DDL is a project which aims to perform dynamic
> linking on Windows, and it works damn well.  It also has a lot of
> useful utility functions to i.e. look up symbols and types by name in
> the dynamic library.  There's also another project unrelated to D
> called EDLL which more or less does the same things that DDL does; I
> don't know if anyone has successfully used it with D.