On 5/24/21 10:02 AM, Mike Parker wrote:
The latest post in the D and C series dives into the weeds of D and C
strings: how they're implemented, when you need to NUL-terminate your D
strings and when you don't, and how the storage of literals in memory
allows you to avoid NUL termination in one case you might not have
considered and another case that you shouldn't rely on but can in
practice with the current compilers.
There are at least two more posts worth of information to go into on
this topic, but everything in this post is enough to cover many use
cases of D to C string interop.
The blog:
https://dlang.org/blog/2021/05/24/interfacing-d-with-c-strings-part-one/
Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/njyf76/interfacing_d_with_c_strings_part_one/
Nice article!
Note that there is a huge pitfall awaiting you if you use `toStringz`:
garbage collection. You may want to amend the article to identify this
pitfall.
And I'm not talking about requiring `@nogc`, I'm talking about the GC
collecting the data while C is still using it.
In your example:
```d
puts(s1.toStringz());
```
This leaves a GC-collectible allocation in C land. For `puts`, it's
fine, as the data is not used past the call, but in something else that
might keep it somewhere not accessible to the GC, you'll want to assign
that to a variable that lasts as long as the resource is used.
-Steve
