Sane API design (AKA C's #ifdef hell)

[Richard (Rikki) Andrew Cattermole]

On 21/04/2026 5:57 AM, Kagamin wrote:
> On Friday, 17 April 2026 at 14:37:28 UTC, Richard (Rikki) Andrew 
> Cattermole wrote:
>> Metadata generators can be quite good like with OpenGL, but there are 
>> others... such as COM which are absolutely horrid c++ mixed 
>> monstrosities. I'm still unsure if it was a good thing or not for 
>> Walter to never implement it. It was part of D's original design 
>> document to include support.
> 
> Did I miss something? D supports COM, I wrote bindings for 7zip COM 
> interfaces and it's as clean as you can get
> ```d
> interface IArchiveOpenCallback : IUnknown
> {
>      enum ID=ArchiveIID(0x10);
>      HRESULT SetTotal(in ulong* files, in ulong* bytes);
>      HRESULT SetCompleted(in ulong* files, in ulong* bytes);
> }
> 
> interface IProgress : IUnknown
> {
>      enum ID=CommonIID(0, 5);
>      HRESULT SetTotal(in ulong total);
>      HRESULT SetCompleted(in ulong* completeValue);
> }
> 
> interface IArchiveExtractCallback : IProgress
> {
>      enum ID=ArchiveIID(0x20);
>      HRESULT GetStream(uint index, ISequentialOutStream* outStream, int 
> askExtractMode);
>      HRESULT PrepareOperation(int askExtractMode);
>      HRESULT SetOperationResult(int opRes);
> }
> ```
> granted, 7zip doesn't use ifdef hell.

There is more to COM than this.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/com/idl-files