On 7/8/2012 4:13 AM, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
How is this going to work, is it going to be an optional feature? I mean, this will add DStep (D and Clang) as dependencies to DMD.
I think that implicitly using the feature will depend on those programs being available. It also means that any 3rd party can supply such a feature, to import a file in any format.
DStep is built to be used as a library, I can easily create a C API which can be used directly by DMD. No need for creating a new process. I can also make DStep give back the translate D code, no need for creating temporarily D files.
I think there are many advantages to DStep being a separate program, not the least of which is debugging the output of it. Also, it means DStep could be written in any language. For example, suppose a Go-to-D is proposed. Go provides a Go library to parse Go code - so such a tool might be more easily written in Go than in D.
BTW, how would you indicate that the header file is an Objective-C file? Since both C and Objective-C uses the same extension for header files, this is required by Clang, otherwise it will treat the file as a C file.
Since OC is a proper superset of C, this shouldn't be a problem. Just run the OC converter as your "C" compiler.
In that project I had a tool for converting C/Objective-c headers to D modules. This tool was a Ruby script based on BridgeSupport. This is a complete rewrite of that tool. The whole project was called DStep and the name fit among other Objective-C related names like NeXTSTEP, OpenStep and GNUStep.
The name makes more sense now, but for marketing reasons it should give more of a clue as to what it does.
