On Monday, 23 July 2018 at 08:08:03 UTC, Mike Franklin wrote:
On Monday, 23 July 2018 at 06:24:04 UTC, Zheng (Vic) Luo wrote:
Moreover, The term "dependency-free" in the project
description often confuses me, because as a hardware-agnostic
library the project does have to depend on external
implementations like "sin"/"memset" or even "thread_start",
and I'm not sure which kind of dependency is proper for this
project: Should we assume a multi-threading model? Should this
library rely on "malloc"/"free"? Correct me if my
understanding is wrong since I had few experience on embedded
programming.
There is more to this project than just getting a software
rasterizer in D. Part of the goal is to demonstrate D as a
formidable alternative to C in micrcontroller firmware
programming. D will never achieve that notoriety if it's
always depending on C, the C runtime, the C standard library,
or some library implemented in C.
So, IMO, if you need to link in a library or object file that
was not compiled from D code, then you're cheating. This is
also one of the reasons why I suggested re-implementing
software building blocks such as `memcpy`, `memset`, `malloc`,
`free`, etc. in D as another potential project for the Autumn
of Code.
So, to keep this software rasterizer project within scope, I
suggest creating naive implementations of those functions in D
for now to stay true to spirit of the project (no dependencies,
everything in D), and "make the point". You can those software
building blocks in their own module, and let the user of the
software rasterizer library link it their own implementation if
they wish to deviate from the spirit of the proposal.
Mike
I agree
But this BetterC minimalistic standard library (allocations,
arrays, strings, slices, maps) is something which can be reused
by many similar hardware-level projects.
This is a project on its own, and as I said, I think it should
better be provided to the candidate so he can use his development
time on developing the rasterizer, and, if there is enough time,
a minimalistic nuklear-like gui system over it to demonstrate its
performance and usefulness.
