The CAPI Manifesto

[Jude Young]

Fair enough, thanks for the time.
I found a thin D binding to ncurses, and 'fixed' it to work with D2.
If y'all get this up and running, this code will probably be better than
starting from scratch.

In any case, I think that CAPI is exactly the type of thing that D needs
going forward.
I really hope that CAPI gets good support.

On Mon, Oct 17, 2011 at 12:55 AM, Walter Bright
<newshound2 at digitalmars.com>wrote:

> On 10/16/2011 9:28 PM, Jude Young wrote:
>
>> Please excuse my ignorance,
>> but several types in D do not currently translate well into C.
>>
>> For example, strings in D are not '\0' terminated, which breaks with C.
>>
>
> This is incorrect. String literals in D are 0 terminated, as in C. C has a
> convention that strings are 0 terminated, but it isn't part of the core
> language. In D, you can terminate a string with 0 if you want to, or not.
>
>
>  This is not usually a problem, and it's easy to wrap the function in the
>> translated header file to automate that particular process.
>>
>
> This would fall under attempting to fix the api, which would be beyond the
> scope of the library.
>
>
>
>  It seems that your proposal would disallow this particular example.
>> The translation code would have to be somewhere, what is the argument
>> against
>> allowing it?
>>
>
> D access to the C API should be direct, and not include hidden costs like
> translation layers.
>
>
>
>  In my (admittedly ignorant) opinion, it seems that allowing the automatic
>> translation of D types to C types
>> would fit very well, otherwise you'll have to add them yourself every time
>> you
>> wish to call C.
>>
>
> C doesn't actually even have a 'string' type.
>
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