D, windows developement, frustration and fish

[ketmar via Digitalmars-d]

today i was in need of a little utility that must download the file using 
"wininet.dll". nothing fancy, just send a request and receive the 
contents. no, curl was not a choice. and -- oh, well, wininet is a dll 
which any windows box has, right? at least any windows box with XP and 
higher, which is ok.

allright, i know that winapi bindings is a separate project, and it's ok 
for me: i fired my git and cloned the repo. surely, "wininet.d" was there.

then i used my shiny fresh DMD build (i just did that to check my fix for 
"read after free" patch) to compile a simple test program.

aaah! there is no "wininet.lib"! ok, installing msvc is a time and space 
consuming thing, and i know that dmc has that cool "implib" utility, 
which i can use to make the corresponding .lib file (ah, i love windows 
developement!).

so i ran "implib.exe /s wininet.lib c:\windows\system32\wininet.dll", 
copied the resulting "wininet.lib" to "lib" directory of dmd and tried to 
compile my sample:

dmd.exe test.d ... /L+wininet.lib

no luck.

  Error 42: Symbol Undefined _InternetReadFile at 16
  Error 42: Symbol Undefined _InternetCloseHandle at 4
  ... and so on

wait, what?! i just successfully created that stupid import library!

ok, maybe i read digital mars site wrong and i shouldn't use "/s" switch 
with "implib"? ah, fine, let's try...

no luck. the same errors. WTF?! what i did wrong here?! ok, let's think a 
minute... yes! dmd wants mangled symbols, and wininet.dll has unmangled 
symbols. so optlink searching for "_InternetReadFile at 16", while it should 
search for "InternetReadFile". got that.

now, when i identified the problem, i see that i must fix it on D side. 
let's try that nice `pragma(mangle, "xxx")` thingy, that's the exact 
situation when i need that!

i tried several mangle variants, manually editing "wininet.d" file. 
recreated "wininet.lib" several times. you know what? still no luck.

shit, that "simple utility" is not so simple after all. it already took 
much more time than downloading and installing msvc can take. damn it!

after some experiments i found that DMD simply ignores `pragma(mangle)` 
for `extern(Windows)` definitions. great news. so what i have to do now?

i took that error output and transformed it to "wininet.def" file with 
simple regexp. then i generated "wininet.lib" once again. then i tried to 
compile my sample once again. and this time i got working ".exe". great. 
a simple utility which using one of standard windows dlls. i can write it 
in no time, right?

that was current DMD git head, which is considered almost ready for 
releasing. super. brilliant. it's really easy to use. now i see why DMD 
doesn't need a windows debugger: you simply can't debug a program that 
you can't compile.

years in developement. 2.067 release. still can't compile simple utility 
without solving stupid puzzles. manual creating of .def files. my C 
developement mates making fun of me, showing me how their mingw doesn't 
need any ".lib" files at all: mingw linker can parse .dlls! my younger 
mate reads this wonderful verse to me:

  "You are old, father William," the young man said,
  "And your hair has become very white;
  And yet you incessantly stand on your head —
  Do you think, at your age, it is right?"

what can i answer to it?

  "In my youth," father William replied to his son,
  "I feared it would injure the brain;
  But now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,
  Why, I do it again and again."
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