Paradox about D's popularity.

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 2011-09-22 11:47, Regan Heath wrote:
> At one time (2+ years back) I started writing a C lexer, and then C
> preprocessor in D. In part to learn about how compilers work and in part
> to convert C headers to D (there was no .di at that stage) so I could
> interface C. The lexer was no trouble, I even managed to make it
> flexible by having it read a C grammar file but when I got to the
> preprocessor I lost steam/momentum and it all fell by the way side.
>
> Something I discovered, which may help bootstrap your plans, is that
> most C compilers will preprocess source for you and give you the
> resulting stream of text, which you can then lex/parse/etc. However,
> this results in the C compiler processing macros and following includes,
> which you often don't actually want it to do - as you're likely trying
> to replicate the file tree (so want to see includes) and trying to
> replace macros with CTFE or similar.
>
> So, perhaps a combined approach, tame a compiler and have it preprocess
> a file at a time and then use that output, plus the original file to
> produce some D replacement code.. not sure if that would work but it
> might be worth investigating.
>
> R
>
>

I've done something similar using Clang: 
https://github.com/jacob-carlborg/clang

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg