On Thursday, 21 August 2014 at 20:33:56 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
On 8/21/2014 11:54 AM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
LOL. Yeah, well, it would be ni going to support C+ce if we
could get an actual
list of the C++ features that D currently supports somewhere
(and how to use
them if it's not obvious). You've been doing so much great
work on that that I
have no clue what the current state of things is. For
instance, this is the
first I've heard of anything about template support; I'd
thought that we were
never going to support templates. Is it just for name mangling
or for actually
compiling them?
The thing is, while the code was there, there wasn't a single
test case for it in the test suite. Furthermore, at least for
Elf, there was no support for the special mangling done for
::std:: stuff.
The thing is, modern C++ practice makes heavy use of std types.
Having an interface to C++ code is fairly unusable unless D can
also interface to std::string, std::vector, and a few others.
The first step is to support the mangling of them. Then, try to
construct a "workalike" on the D side that follows D rules, and
yet is able to seamlessly interact with the corresponding C++
code.
We'll see how far we can get with that, and then evaluate what
to do next.
There are no plans for actually compiling C++ code with a D
compiler. The plan is for support like we do for C - have a .d
"header" file for it.
Well, I wouldn't have expected us to be compiling C++ per se, but
previously, it seemed like the party line was that we wouldn't be
supporting C++ templates at all because of how hard they were and
because we don't want a C++ compiler in the D compiler. I'm
certainly all for anything we can do for C++ compatability
without going off the deep end. I just don't hear much about what
we're actually doing right now. So, I really have no idea what
the current status of that is. With what was said at dconf and
comments like these, it seems like we're making huge progress in
comparison to where we were, and as far as I can tell, about the
only way to hear about it is to either pay a lot of attention to
dmd pulls or to see an occasonal comment from Daniel talking
about it or from someone who's paying close attention to what
he's up to. So, at some point in the near future, it would be
nice if there were somewhere that actually said what D can
actually do with C++ now, even if that doesn't include everything
that's going to be coming or if much of it is marked as
experimental and relatively untested.
- Jonathan M Davis
