More automated interfacing of D with C codebases

[Brad Lanam]

On Sunday, 21 October 2012 at 19:45:53 UTC, timotheecour wrote:
> I've had good experience using SWIG to automate the job for me,
> and used it successfully to port the following libraries to D:

Yes.  SWIG should be a lot faster than my tool.
Also I don't have any units to handle C++ code.

Completely agree. It has to be automated.

> Swig isn't perfect however, and sometimes will bail out on
> constructs such as:
> C++ classes with multiple inheritance, or a few obscure C or C++
> constructs. Even in that case, I find it much easier to tweak

If I recall, I ran into some obscure C constructs in the Tcl/Tk/X 
headers that I have never seen before.  I believe I had to 
various aliases to my "interface file" to handle those.  Also use 
of D reserved words had to be handled:

   substitute new new_
   substitute class class_
   substitute 'function;' 'function_;'

And some things just plain won't work in D:

   # not valid D code.
   substitute '_XPrivate .private9, .private10;' \
             '_XPrivate * private9, private10;'