On Thursday, 27 March 2025 at 14:06:43 UTC, Richard (Rikki) Andrew Cattermole wrote:
> On 28/03/2025 2:58 AM, Mike Shah wrote:
>> betterC if I recall/inferred was somewhat a marketing term for the flag. '-no-runtime' is essentially what it does and indeed probably a better name.
>
> To be more exact, it is a marketing term for a collection of switches, only one of which is turning off linking against druntime.
>
> I am very cautious and rather unhappy at the connection people are drawing between the two. The distinction matters and would only cause pain to conflate, should any alterations were to be made.

The spec for betterC (https://dlang.org/spec/betterc.html) starts off by saying that it doesn't depend on the D runtime library, only the C one.

So perhaps there is a way to make it clearer about what the purpose/motivation is and what exactly it is doing?

On Thursday, 27 March 2025 at 16:41:48 UTC, jmh530 wrote:
> The spec for betterC (https://dlang.org/spec/betterc.html) starts off by saying that it doesn't depend on the D runtime library, only the C one.

Maybe it should not only say that it does not depend upon the runtime, but also does not support large portions of the standard library as they depend upon the runtime?

On 28/03/2025 5:41 AM, jmh530 wrote:
> On Thursday, 27 March 2025 at 14:06:43 UTC, Richard (Rikki) Andrew Cattermole wrote:
>> On 28/03/2025 2:58 AM, Mike Shah wrote:
>>> betterC if I recall/inferred was somewhat a marketing term for the flag. '-no-runtime' is essentially what it does and indeed probably a better name.
>>
>> To be more exact, it is a marketing term for a collection of switches, only one of which is turning off linking against druntime.
>>
>> I am very cautious and rather unhappy at the connection people are drawing between the two. The distinction matters and would only cause pain to conflate, should any alterations were to be made.
> 
> The spec for betterC (https://dlang.org/spec/betterc.html) starts off by saying that it doesn't depend on the D runtime library, only the C one.
> 
> So perhaps there is a way to make it clearer about what the purpose/ motivation is and what exactly it is doing?

I'm inclined to suggest that we need a giant red warning on that page basically stating that not linking against druntime has intended implications that will result in loss of polish for the language.

On Thursday, 27 March 2025 at 17:06:11 UTC, Richard (Rikki) Andrew Cattermole wrote:
> On 28/03/2025 5:41 AM, jmh530 wrote:
>> On Thursday, 27 March 2025 at 14:06:43 UTC, Richard (Rikki) Andrew Cattermole wrote:
>> The spec for betterC (https://dlang.org/spec/betterc.html) starts off by saying that it doesn't depend on the D runtime library, only the C one.
>> 
>> So perhaps there is a way to make it clearer about what the purpose/ motivation is and what exactly it is doing?
>
> I'm inclined to suggest that we need a giant red warning on that page basically stating that not linking against druntime has intended implications that will result in loss of polish for the language.

Isn't it just his particular thing to wind folks up?

In experimenting with betterC, I went in eyes open, rather expecting to have little or no support from the standard library (other than the bits under core.stdc, even if them).

Even then I came across bits where I concluded I had to manually access stuff via C, and then had to battle things - some of the stdargs/varargs bits I ran in to.

On Thursday, 27 March 2025 at 17:16:07 UTC, Derek Fawcus wrote:
> On Thursday, 27 March 2025 at 17:06:11 UTC, Richard (Rikki) Andrew Cattermole wrote:
>> On 28/03/2025 5:41 AM, jmh530 wrote:
>>> [...]
>>
>> I'm inclined to suggest that we need a giant red warning on that page basically stating that not linking against druntime has intended implications that will result in loss of polish for the language.
>
> Isn't it just his particular thing to wind folks up?
>
> In experimenting with betterC, I went in eyes open, rather expecting to have little or no support from the standard library (other than the bits under core.stdc, even if them).
>
> Even then I came across bits where I concluded I had to manually access stuff via C, and then had to battle things - some of the stdargs/varargs bits I ran in to.

What he's pointing out is that importing the provided core modules is not 'on par' with importing the equivalent C header with a C compiler. Macro translated into functions on D side are missing.

On Thursday, 27 March 2025 at 14:06:43 UTC, Richard (Rikki) Andrew Cattermole wrote:
> On 28/03/2025 2:58 AM, Mike Shah wrote:
>> betterC if I recall/inferred was somewhat a marketing term for the flag. '-no-runtime' is essentially what it does and indeed probably a better name.
>
> To be more exact, it is a marketing term for a collection of switches, only one of which is turning off linking against druntime.

What are the other switches? I thought the only thing -betterC does is forego linking druntime.

On 3/18/2025 11:36 PM, Meta wrote:
> His other main gripe was that the compiler rejects .h files, even though when he changed the extension to .c, it compiled and ran just fine. In the footnote section he actually downloads the source code and modifies it to compile .h files, and it's a surprisingly simple change. I wonder if there's a specific reason Walter didn't allow it.

The reason is Iain didn't like it because he had file.d and file.h in the same directory. He did implement a rather complex (in my opinion) way to disambiguate it, and I preferred simply having an order. We did not reach an agreement, and so .h files are not considered.

Is this stupid? Yes.

On 3/19/2025 12:17 AM, Manu wrote:
> Literally every single person that has ever tried to use ImportC instantly complained that it doesn't import .h files. There's no reason not to merge his patch.
> There's been lots of discussion about this, and it seems that Walter just has some arbitrary opinion that it shouldn't work.
> What Walter wants you to do is write a one-line .c file somewhere in your source tree, with `#include "the_header.h"`; completely pointless exercise, and as this guy points out, it breaks the cool tech-demo and instantly converts every person that touches this from "WOW!" to "WTF?!"... def should fix this.

Iain reverted my change to import .h files. We did not reach an agreement. The debate is in the git history.

On 3/19/2025 12:54 AM, Meta wrote:
> To Walter: whatever technical reasons you might have for not accepting .h files, 

I'm well aware of this.