On Tuesday, 14 August 2018 at 23:05:26 UTC, Joe wrote:
I'm attempting a piecemeal conversion of some C programs. I've
converted a few that depend on C modules that are in a library
and now I'm sort of in the middle of converting those C
modules. One of them has an array of strings, i.e., array of
char*, which most easily translated to D's string[]. However,
the array is used by a function that expects a const char*, so
I had to use toStringz to pass those values.
Now there are some C programs that haven't been converted yet,
but they depend on the function above. When linking those
programs, the linker complains about an undefined reference to
the mangled name of std.string.toStringz.
What is the most appropriate way around this? Is there a way to
declare an array of const char* and initialize it to literal
strings? Or can the mangled name (and Phobos library) somehow
be made visible to the linker?
The correct thing to do is to keep the original C function
signatures in the converted code, i.e. don't change char* to
string[]. And don't use anything from Phobos internally that
requires linking. In other words, treat your converted code as C
code in a D module as much as possible. Only when the conversion
is complete and everything is in D do you start pulling in the D
features.
