The CAPI Manifesto

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 2011-10-17 04:18, Ary Manzana wrote:
> On 10/16/11 11:02 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
>> Brad and I were talking about some D code that needed openssl support,
>> when we ran into the same old problem:
>>
>> No D files corresponding to the openssl C .h files.
>>
>> It's not that these are a big problem to create, it's just that they are
>> not done, and it tends to turn off people from using D. D is binary API
>> compatible with C, but only with a corresponding D import file. This,
>> out of the box, makes D *harder* to use than C.
>>
>> Lots of people roll their own, but that work is hard to find and
>> haphazard.
>>
>> This problem keeps coming up again and again.
>>
>> So I propose creating, on github.com/D-Programming-Language, a new
>> repository called CAPI.
>
> So you would put every interface to every possible C code there?
>
> In Ruby if you want to have very efficient code you'd implement it as C
> extensions. For that, you create wrappers in Ruby for C. Now, big part
> of the standard library has extensions for the most needed things.
> Everything else, like bindings to an efficient xml parser, are made by
> different people that public them as gems. Having a public gem
> repository it's really easy to find bindings for whatever you want. They
> don't need to be part of the standard library. And it wouldn't make
> sense, having so much functionality out there available as C code.
>
> So I'd suggest having D headers for the most common things in phobos and
> focusing on a tool like rubygems. It would give such a big boost to the
> language.
>
> I also can't imagine how that big repository would work. You'd copy the
> remote file locally? What if that file gets fixes? You'd copy it again?
> Or maybe you'd git checkout everything from that repository locally and
> synchronize it from time to time, with the chance of breaking existing
> code...
>
> Having "gems" and versioning them should make all these problems
> disappear. Maybe there is an openssl header in D. The problem is that
> there might be many, and they don't know each other, and google is a
> maze to find such things.

Already working on a package manager for D:

https://github.com/jacob-carlborg/orbit/wiki/Orbit-Package-Manager-for-D
https://github.com/jacob-carlborg/orbit/

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg