On Thursday, 26 April 2012 at 22:45:01 UTC, Trass3r wrote:
I'd say that usable htod generated headers still are a welcome
addition to Deimos.
David
Even using some regex's is better than htod. It drops const,
removes or messes up the comments etc.
There are also many things that should be changed in a binding to
make it more D compatible, without affecting the C binding. Many
C libraries define their own bool type, but D has a bool type
that can be used just as easily, also making it easier to write D
using native types.
Lots of C code has extraneous typedefs that are only there to
strip out struct and union keywords, so they can be rewritten.
enums cause issues because the C enum:
enum Status {
STATUS_SUCCESS
}
has type enum Status and the members are access like
STATUS_SUCCESS. The same enum in D is
enum Status {
STATUS_SUCCESS
}
has type Status and the members are accessed using
Status.STATUS_SUCCESS, which can be very bloated when converting
heavily-namespaced code into D, because accessing the member
CAIRO_STATUS_NO_MEMORY from the enum cario_status_t is fine in C,
and neccessary because of the lack of modules, but the same in D
is cario_status_t.CAIRO_STATUS_NO_MEMORY, which is very verbose.
Consider that this is one of the shorter enums in cairo, then it
becomes a problem.
Sometimes code will rely on specific, extra, headers to determine
what to do, further complicating bindings, especially when you
need to check for certain functionality.
htod is not a useful tool, especially if you want to do any sort
of cross-platform, robust binding, manual binding is really the
only way to do it properly and properly reflect the original
binding and api of the library.
It doesn't take that long, I did the binding for the 3000 line
cairo.h file in about 3 hours, through judicious use of regex
replaces and macros (I love Vim).
--
James Miller
