Hello everyone,

i have a rather general question about how to approach the attempt to create a binding for a foreign system, for which bindings already exists for other languages than dlang.

To be more concrete: There is this Database i am using in some recent projects: "Apache Cassandra" / "ScyllaDB" - unfortunately, there is no binding for D (afaik "cassandra-d" is incomplete and the development stands still).
However, There are some up to date bindings for other programming languages (https://docs.scylladb.com/using-scylla/scylla_drivers/).

Can someone with experience in this field give some advice?
Would it be possible to use (e.g.) the C++ Project to build $SOMETHING for D?
Or would it be better to try to implement it yourself (based on a paper or a existing binding)?

Looking forward for an interesting read :)

On Saturday, 28 September 2019 at 09:18:24 UTC, Martin Brezeln wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> i have a rather general question about how to approach the attempt to create a binding for a foreign system, for which bindings already exists for other languages than dlang.
>
> To be more concrete: There is this Database i am using in some recent projects: "Apache Cassandra" / "ScyllaDB" - unfortunately, there is no binding for D (afaik "cassandra-d" is incomplete and the development stands still).
> However, There are some up to date bindings for other programming languages (https://docs.scylladb.com/using-scylla/scylla_drivers/).
>
> Can someone with experience in this field give some advice?
> Would it be possible to use (e.g.) the C++ Project to build $SOMETHING for D?
> Or would it be better to try to implement it yourself (based on a paper or a existing binding)?
>
> Looking forward for an interesting read :)

If this is a C library (I can't really tell for sure from the linked page) you can use DStep to automatically create bindings:
https://github.com/jacob-carlborg/dstep

If you don't want bindings, but just want to #include the header files, you can use dpp
https://github.com/atilaneves/dpp

For the most part, if you want to use C libraries in a project, you shouldn't need to do much work. To do it manually, there's this page
https://dlang.org/spec/interfaceToC.html