Writing a library

[Jarrett Billingsley]

"Bill Baxter" <dnewsgroup at billbaxter.com> wrote in message 
news:er58l2$i21$1 at digitalmars.com...
>
> I'm not sure if the GC will work normally or not.  But I'm pretty sure 
> you'll need to do something to startup and initialize the GC on the D 
> side.  Check out WinMain in 
> http://www.dsource.org/projects/minwin/browser/trunk/minwin/app.d at line 
> 144.  In particular the calls to gc_init(), _minit(), _moduleCtor() and 
> _moduleUnitTests().

The GC should work normally, but one thing you have to do is to make sure 
you keep references to any GC memory (i.e. anything allocated with 'new' in 
your D code) in the DLL.  One way of doing this for classes is to keep a 
static list or AA of all instances of the class in the class:

class ExportedClass
{
    static bool[ExportedClass] instances;

    this()
    {
        ....
        instances[this] = true;
    }

    ~this()
    {
        instances.remove(this);
    }
}

This way, there is at least one reference to each class instance held in the 
DLL, so that the instances won't get collected.  When the instances are 
deleted, they are removed from the list.