On Wed, 21 Sep 2011 22:33:06 +0100, Dmitry Olshansky
<[email protected]> wrote:
On 22.09.2011 1:14, Gor F. Gyolchanyan wrote:
I had an idea of a D library for including C headers for a while now.
All i need is to make a compile-time C parser for that. This thing
would literally
remove any need for binding.
Translating header file is a one-time job, as in
sh-$: translate fancy.h fancy.di
Why would you need to do it at compile time, except because it's fancy
:), I don't quite get.
And, as much as I'm sorry to bring bad news, you'd have to make a C
preprocessor as well (or even in the first place). Then you'd have to
struggle through vendor extensions but that's doable.
At one time (2+ years back) I started writing a C lexer, and then C
preprocessor in D. In part to learn about how compilers work and in part
to convert C headers to D (there was no .di at that stage) so I could
interface C. The lexer was no trouble, I even managed to make it flexible
by having it read a C grammar file but when I got to the preprocessor I
lost steam/momentum and it all fell by the way side.
Something I discovered, which may help bootstrap your plans, is that most
C compilers will preprocess source for you and give you the resulting
stream of text, which you can then lex/parse/etc. However, this results
in the C compiler processing macros and following includes, which you
often don't actually want it to do - as you're likely trying to replicate
the file tree (so want to see includes) and trying to replace macros with
CTFE or similar.
So, perhaps a combined approach, tame a compiler and have it preprocess a
file at a time and then use that output, plus the original file to produce
some D replacement code.. not sure if that would work but it might be
worth investigating.
R
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