Hi, all. I wanted to get into the world of 3DS homebrew, but I really didn't feel like coding in C or C++. So, through an effort of sheer will, I somehow got a hello world example written in D up and running, along with bindings for most of libctru and citro3d.

https://github.com/TheGag96/3ds-hello-dlang

Included are instructions on how to set this up (although it's pretty hacky). I imagine one could easily start writing Switch homebrew in D by following most of these steps as well. Once GCC 10 comes out with an updated GDC, it might become a pretty attractive alternative to C/++ for such projects if some work is put into bindings and stuff.

Hope someone finds this interesting!

On Sunday, 20 October 2019 at 06:06:48 UTC, TheGag96 wrote:
> Hi, all. I wanted to get into the world of 3DS homebrew, but I really didn't feel like coding in C or C++. So, through an effort of sheer will, I somehow got a hello world example written in D up and running, along with bindings for most of libctru and citro3d.
>
> https://github.com/TheGag96/3ds-hello-dlang
>
> Included are instructions on how to set this up (although it's pretty hacky). I imagine one could easily start writing Switch homebrew in D by following most of these steps as well. Once GCC 10 comes out with an updated GDC, it might become a pretty attractive alternative to C/++ for such projects if some work is put into bindings and stuff.
>
> Hope someone finds this interesting!

Definitely :-)

Did you try with LDC?
Just a wild guess but perhaps this triple will work: `-mtriple=armv6k-unknown-eabi`.

-Johan

On Sunday, 20 October 2019 at 06:06:48 UTC, TheGag96 wrote:
> Hi, all. I wanted to get into the world of 3DS homebrew, but I really didn't feel like coding in C or C++. So, through an effort of sheer will, I somehow got a hello world example written in D up and running, along with bindings for most of libctru and citro3d.
>
> https://github.com/TheGag96/3ds-hello-dlang
>
> Included are instructions on how to set this up (although it's pretty hacky). I imagine one could easily start writing Switch homebrew in D by following most of these steps as well. Once GCC 10 comes out with an updated GDC, it might become a pretty attractive alternative to C/++ for such projects if some work is put into bindings and stuff.
>
> Hope someone finds this interesting!

I'm really gonna give it a try. Really nice, nice work.

On Sun, 20 Oct 2019 at 08:10, TheGag96 via Digitalmars-d-announce <digitalmars-d-announce@puremagic.com> wrote:
>
> Hi, all. I wanted to get into the world of 3DS homebrew, but I really didn't feel like coding in C or C++. So, through an effort of sheer will, I somehow got a hello world example written in D up and running, along with bindings for most of libctru and citro3d.
>
> https://github.com/TheGag96/3ds-hello-dlang
>
> Included are instructions on how to set this up (although it's pretty hacky). I imagine one could easily start writing Switch homebrew in D by following most of these steps as well. Once GCC 10 comes out with an updated GDC, it might become a pretty attractive alternative to C/++ for such projects if some work is put into bindings and stuff.
>
> Hope someone finds this interesting!

Great stuff!  Though I don't think you'll find much improvement in gdc 10 regarding switching off D features.  Backported patches to make gdc on parity with dmd as of April 2019 was done prior to the gdc 9 release.  I'm not aware of much more being done regarding that other than some extern(C) library functions being converted into templates, and the C main function being moved to a common location in D runtime (C main is not "compiled into" gdc unlike previous versions of dmd).

-- 
Iain

On Sun, 20 Oct 2019 at 17:27, Iain Buclaw <ibuclaw@gdcproject.org> wrote:
>
> On Sun, 20 Oct 2019 at 08:10, TheGag96 via Digitalmars-d-announce <digitalmars-d-announce@puremagic.com> wrote:
> >
> > Hi, all. I wanted to get into the world of 3DS homebrew, but I really didn't feel like coding in C or C++. So, through an effort of sheer will, I somehow got a hello world example written in D up and running, along with bindings for most of libctru and citro3d.
> >
> > https://github.com/TheGag96/3ds-hello-dlang
> >
> > Included are instructions on how to set this up (although it's pretty hacky). I imagine one could easily start writing Switch homebrew in D by following most of these steps as well. Once GCC 10 comes out with an updated GDC, it might become a pretty attractive alternative to C/++ for such projects if some work is put into bindings and stuff.
> >
> > Hope someone finds this interesting!
>
> Great stuff!  Though I don't think you'll find much improvement in gdc 10 regarding switching off D features.  Backported patches to make gdc on parity with dmd as of April 2019 was done prior to the gdc 9 release.  I'm not aware of much more being done regarding that other than some extern(C) library functions being converted into templates, and the C main function being moved to a common location in D runtime (C main is not "compiled into" gdc unlike previous versions of dmd).
>

For citation on betterC, this is the dmd-cxx PR: https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/9678

And the commit done to gcc trunk: https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/commit/7ad41fff7142a495d030e55aa93ae4959b804494

-- 
Iain

On Sunday, 20 October 2019 at 06:06:48 UTC, TheGag96 wrote:
> Hi, all. I wanted to get into the world of 3DS homebrew, but I really didn't feel like coding in C or C++. So, through an effort of sheer will, I somehow got a hello world example written in D up and running, along with bindings for most of libctru and citro3d.
>
> https://github.com/TheGag96/3ds-hello-dlang
>
> Included are instructions on how to set this up (although it's pretty hacky). I imagine one could easily start writing Switch homebrew in D by following most of these steps as well. Once GCC 10 comes out with an updated GDC, it might become a pretty attractive alternative to C/++ for such projects if some work is put into bindings and stuff.
>
> Hope someone finds this interesting!

Awesome work. I used to hack around on my original NDS and thought about maybe trying to get D working on it, but didn't have sufficient time or motivation. I'll definitely play around with this.

On Sunday, 20 October 2019 at 09:36:17 UTC, Johan Engelen wrote:
> Did you try with LDC?
> Just a wild guess but perhaps this triple will work: `-mtriple=armv6k-unknown-eabi`.
>
> -Johan

I haven't yet, but I've been told also by someone else to try! It would certainly be nice to have a true -betterC going with this. Does LDC have equivalent flags for what devkitARM wants passed into GCC, like:

-march=armv6k -mtune=mpcore -mfloat-abi=hard -mtp=soft
-mword-relocations -fomit-frame-pointer -ffunction-sections

?

On Sunday, 20 October 2019 at 15:27:35 UTC, Iain Buclaw wrote:
> Great stuff!  Though I don't think you'll find much improvement in gdc 10 regarding switching off D features.  Backported patches to make gdc on parity with dmd as of April 2019 was done prior to the gdc 9 release.  I'm not aware of much more being done regarding that other than some extern(C) library functions being converted into templates, and the C main function being moved to a common location in D runtime (C main is not "compiled into" gdc unlike previous versions of dmd).

Darn... Are there any plans at some point in the future to add a real -betterC sort of flag? It would be really really nice to be able to compile something like...

import std.bitmanip : bitfields;

struct Stuff {
  mixin(bitfields!(
        uint, "x",    2,
        int,  "y",    3,
        uint, "z",    2,
        bool, "flag", 1));
}

extern(C) void main() {
  Stuff x;
}

...just as in DMD or LDC.

On Sunday, 20 October 2019 at 17:40:04 UTC, Meta wrote:
> Awesome work. I used to hack around on my original NDS and thought about maybe trying to get D working on it, but didn't have sufficient time or motivation. I'll definitely play around with this.

Last year I was able to get some C very simple code running on the DS, hacked into Pokemon Platinum... I imagine it could be done with -betterC, I guess! Following this tutorial might do a good chunk of the work to setting it up. You'd just need to copy similar stuff I did in 3ds_rules and my (horrific) Makefile in nds_rules. You could get by converting an example DS hello world and declaring any functions/structs needed in your main file as a start.

On Sun, 20 Oct 2019 at 20:40, TheGag96 via Digitalmars-d-announce <digitalmars-d-announce@puremagic.com> wrote:
>
> On Sunday, 20 October 2019 at 15:27:35 UTC, Iain Buclaw wrote:
> > Great stuff!  Though I don't think you'll find much improvement in gdc 10 regarding switching off D features.  Backported patches to make gdc on parity with dmd as of April 2019 was done prior to the gdc 9 release.  I'm not aware of much more being done regarding that other than some extern(C) library functions being converted into templates, and the C main function being moved to a common location in D runtime (C main is not "compiled into" gdc unlike previous versions of dmd).
>
> Darn... Are there any plans at some point in the future to add a real -betterC sort of flag? It would be really really nice to be able to compile something like...
>
> import std.bitmanip : bitfields;
>
> struct Stuff {
>    mixin(bitfields!(
>          uint, "x",    2,
>          int,  "y",    3,
>          uint, "z",    2,
>          bool, "flag", 1));
> }
>
> extern(C) void main() {
>    Stuff x;
> }
>
> ...just as in DMD or LDC.

I called the option switch -fno-druntime, because -betterC was at the time of invention (and still is) a terrible name for a switch. Originally, for a long time, it just meant -fno-mduleinfo, but then -fno-exceptions and -fno-rtti got added which warranted giving it a name that turned off all three (well, four including D asserts, that is not exposed as an option as far as I recall).

If the above works for you in the latest dmd, that's probably because the library has improved, not the compiler. (You need to write code in a way that doesn't depend on D runtime, not just expect the compiler to do everything for you. :-)

-- 
Iain