Playing with Visual D's new mixed solution support

[Adam Wilson via Digitalmars-d]

On 3/19/17 5:16 AM, Mike Parker wrote:
> Every few years I do a little test to see how much effort it takes to
> get the ioquake3 [1] codebase set up in a way that I can replace bits of
> it with D implementations and compile it all together. Not because I
> plan to port the whole thing, but I'm perennially curious how difficult
> it would be for someone to get started on porting a complex C project to
> D piece by piece (the way it should be done). I have to say, Rainer has
> made it easier than ever on Windows with the new Visual D release [2].
>
> So I generated a VS 2015 solution with the ioq3-premake-msvc project
> [3], loaded it up, compiled it all to make sure it works (ioq3 will find
> the Quake3 resources automatically if you have Quake3 installed via
> Steam). Then I added a D file, picked a function to reimplement in D,
> and built it again. This resulted in a handful of linker errors because
> the runtime isn't linked in automatically. Once I opened up the project
> properties and added the path to dmd2/windows/lib32mscoff to the linker
> directories and phobosm32mscoff.lib to the linker input, I had an
> instance of Quake3 running with a D implementation of Sys_Milliseconds [4].
>
> As easy as that. No writing up custom build scripts, no manually adding
> D object files to the ioq3 project, or any of the other approaches I've
> taken in the past. Awesome! I think I'll do a write up on this for the D
> blog in the near future.
>
> Great job, Rainer!
>
> [1] https://ioquake3.org/
> [2] http://forum.dlang.org/thread/oa3dp7$icu$1@digitalmars.com
> [3] https://github.com/jpcy/ioq3-premake-msvc
> [4] http://i.imgur.com/VP0ibfH.png

I personally believe that this may end up being the breakout feature of 
D. The ability to seamlessly inter-operate with other languages will be 
a powerful, real-world, visual of what D can do a professional environment.

I think that we sometimes forget that engineering software is 
multi-disciplinary activity that extends far beyond the confines of good 
languages. We often get into holy-wars here on the forums about 
this-or-that broken language construct. But we often forget what drove 
us here. I mean, would you like me to break out the list of out-right 
brokeness that is C++? Actually, I think Scott Myers (whose talk I am 
impatiently waiting for at DConf this year) does a better job than I 
ever could: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48kP_Ssg2eY And C++ is 
considered a professional language. I would argue that D is no worse 
quality wise then C++/

This project is an excellent first step, but it only works with 
Windows/Visual Studio. We need to follow up with build support across 
platforms. For example, VSCode has a C++ plugin, is there any way the 
Code-D plugin could inter-operate with that as VisualD does? That would 
get us cross-platform editor support. Could DUB be improved to support 
C++? Do other build tools exist that already allow this type of interop? 
I am asking these questions because I don't know. I personally use D 
without C/C++ interop so I've never encountered these problems, but 
these are the types of questions that we will need to answer.

-- 
Adam Wilson
IRC: LightBender
import quiet.dlang.dev;