On Monday, 12 February 2018 at 01:27:19 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
On 2/11/2018 5:05 PM, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) wrote:
Know what is a heavyweight problem worth our while? Having dmd
be able to directly read C .h files, so the poor user does not
have to manually translate them.
We've already got a huge chunk of that problem solved. The
Digital Mars C/C++ front end is now Boost licensed. It can be
used. It's already been converted to D! The preprocessor in it
is a bit dated and a bit too specific to Windows - but we've
got Warp now!
Replace the preprocessor in dmc++ with Warp, slice off the back
end, and make it a module that dmd can import.
Wouldn't it be nice to support:
import stdio.h; // Look, Ma! C headers!
There are some intractable issues, and it may be impossible to
get 100% to "it just works", but looking past that it might be
a huge win for us.
Wow, you converted DMC++'s front-end to D?
To chime in on that, Calypso i.e the LDC+Clang equivalent of what
you described isn't dead (it just revived a few weeks ago from a
long slumber) and it should be possible to make a smaller
codegen-less version for DMD that only depends on a few Clang and
LLVM support libraries. Another possibility..
