Library linking (request)

[Jeremy]

In article <du5hro$2c10$1 at digitaldaemon.com>, Walter Bright says...
>
>
>"Jeremy" <Jeremy_member at pathlink.com> wrote in message 
>news:du0gvn$98o$1 at digitaldaemon.com...
>> reference "alleg40.dll"
>> reference "gameclasses.d"
>> reference "libusb.a"
>> reference "phobos.lib"
>>
>> The library type could be extracted by the file extension. That just looks
>> awesome :) You have to agree... :) It must be possible -- and I think that 
>> would
>> put D far ahead of the competition... imagine getting a new library --  
>> want to
>> install it? Copy hotstuff.xxx to the directory and say 'reference
>> "hotstuff.xxx"' in your Game.d and that's it. Want to compile it? Just say 
>> 'dmd
>> Game.d', that's it (assuming the libraries are in the same directory... -I
>> otherwise etc etc.) -- If it isn't a recognizable library, throw a 
>> compiler
>> error...
>
>The problem with referencing dll's is that you could only reference 
>functions that accepted and returned basic types. No classes, no enums, no 
>structs, no typedefs. 
>

OK, fair enough. But what you can reference, should be this easy. It seems so
intuitive to just tell the compiler in one place what file you want to
reference. To get around strange library hurdles, you should work with the DDL
guys.

Anyway, what Kyle Furlong said in the Bugs forum -- the D language is some
really good stuff... but the framework is lacking (libraries, IDEs, tools etc.)
-- If it was this easy to "plug" in external sources, more people would plug
into it :)

On a somewhat related note -- if I wanted to reference SAPI.DLL to make a
speech-enabled program using Microsoft's SAPI interface, which uses some classes
TGrammar and whatever -- would I simply just not be able to do this (aside from
writing an entire C wrapper library)? Could DDL potentially save me much
trouble?

Jeremy