What's up with the windows headers?

[Phil Lavoie]

Hi,

I am currently using the win32 api bindings project and things 
went rather smoothly in migrating my (not so big) code (so far). 
I love that pragmas are everywhere to make the compiler link to 
proper libraries.

Also, the windows lib included in the distribution of dmd lacks 
the "version" import library, so I had to hand make it, but that 
should not be the case for a out-of-the-box-ready-compiler, so we 
should keep that in mind.

I am willing to help out but at the same time I am really not 
that savvy about Windows system. I will get as savvy as 
Programming Windows will get me though.

So far, I had to modify some code because windows functions 
should be marked as nothrow. Otherwise, they are to be placed in 
try catch blocks in a win-proc (which has to be nothrow I 
believe). So I adjusted those I used (but they usually are in 
"extern(Windows)" blocks so I just added "nothrow" to those, 
correcting a whole bunch of functions at the same time).

There will be some minor changes I think. Like removing the min 
and max templates or just implement them in an other way. See why:
current impl:
template max(T) {
	T max(T a, T b) {
		return a > b ? a : b;
	}
}

template min(T) {
	T min(T a, T b) {
                 return a < b ? a : b;
	}
}
Supposed to replace a macro, but no type inference make it a 
hassle to use (must say min!int( 1, 2 ) for example instead of 
just min(1,2). We could change it to type inferring functions, 
but that already has been done in std.algorithm, plus theirs is 
more powerful (variadic functions). This is just one example but 
I am guessing I will find others (and not all) through my 
experimentations on the Windows system.

I too believe that the whole win32 api headers should be included 
in the distribution, as well as well as any other system 
supported. Though, there could be some kind of package downloads 
to prevent the installation of unused headers. In any case, I 
think it would be nice if AT LEAST the installation platform's 
headers were all with the product. Others could be fetched on 
demand on this website for example.

Phil