A gentle critque..

[Chad J]

Anders F Björklund wrote:
> If you use a tool to help you, translating C headers is not THAT bad.
> Translating C++ headers is trickier, but can be done too if needed...
> I think that D has it slightly easier than some other languages, since 
> it only needs to provide an import module - not any wrapper stubs, etc.

Is there a good tool for C plus plus to C to D translation?

> But it is still easier to link to C code in D, than what it is wih Java.
> You don't need to write or generate the JNI (or CNI) stubs, and so on...

Haha, so true.

> AFAIK, the support for linking against C libraries is a huge part of D.
> For instance, the Phobos std D library uses a lot of the std C library ?
> Not being able to link with "C" means *no* external functions at all...
> (those externals can be written in anything, if they export a "C" API)
> 
> And for a language that supports inline assembler, it would be a bit 
> strange to drop support for linking to "portable assembler" (aka. C) ?

I think I confused the term "linking" with... I don't even know what to 
call it then.  C plus plus integration maybe.

> Most of us translated the headers we needed, and got on with coding...
> Like someone said, 100% for all cases is hard - but it does like 90% ?
> There are several tools available, depending on what type that you like.
> 
> It's a "known bug" with DMD, that such a tool isn't bundled by default.
> I did a perl hack that has worked OK (for me) for translating several 
> large library headers from C to D, maybe I should bundle it with GDC ?
> 
> --anders

I'd probably be pretty happy with 90-95% C plus plus header conversion.

I'd like to see that perl hack.  Is it online somewhere?

I remember trying SWIG to get some C plus plus to D conversion going on, 
but that setup didn't work very well.  Required a lot of work just to 
use it.  Cure is worst than the disease sort of thing.

I noticed an h2d project on dsource.  But I think that only worked on 
linux, or something.  For some reason I wasn't able to even try it.

I don't remember seeing any tools of this kind that were written in D. 
Kind of unfortunate, probably makes it difficult to pool effort out of D 
programmers for something that isn't written in D.

Any other tools I should look at?