On Tuesday, 30 January 2024 at 15:53:50 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
>On Tuesday, 30 January 2024 at 15:44:28 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
>On Tuesday, 30 January 2024 at 15:36:34 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
>There were discussions about the possibility of dmd compiling C code several years ago. My search attempts keep turning up way too many pages, but this is an old idea in the D community.
Okay, here's an early discussion. Not exactly the same, but in the ballpark:
And here's the earliest discussion of an ImportC-style thing that I can find (2006):
https://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/35483.html
>Why not enable dmd to "import" C header files directly?
One of the commenters listed this as a point against:
>- Writers of other D compilers will feel compelled to build in a C compiler so that they can compile such projects.
That's a lot earlier than what I found, but my recollection was that it had been floating around the whole time I've been using D. The idea isn't important for something like this - implementation is all that matters.
I attempted to hack a solution like ImportC at one time, with a script that would call dstep, a C compiler, and dmd. The compilation command was similar to what we have today. That went down in flames quickly because dstep couldn't fully translate headers.