Hi,

I'm a C/C++ programmer. I'm very interested in D.

At the moment my work requires the use of libsndfile (http://www.mega-nerd.com/libsndfile/). Am I right in thinking that I can access Windows .dlls from D? If so, is there an example of how to do this anywhere? Is this difficult to do?

Cheers,

Chris

cps wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm a C/C++ programmer. I'm very interested in D.
> 
> At the moment my work requires the use of libsndfile
> (http://www.mega-nerd.com/libsndfile/). Am I right in thinking that I can
> access Windows .dlls from D? If so, is there an example of how to do this
> anywhere? Is this difficult to do?
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Chris

You are correct that accessing Windows DLLs is possible in D. This page should be a great place to start learning more:

  Writing Win32 DLLs in D
  http://digitalmars.com/d/dll.html

nobody wrote:
> cps wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'm a C/C++ programmer. I'm very interested in D.
>>
>> At the moment my work requires the use of libsndfile
>> (http://www.mega-nerd.com/libsndfile/). Am I right in thinking that I can
>> access Windows .dlls from D? If so, is there an example of how to do this
>> anywhere? Is this difficult to do?
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Chris
> 
> You are correct that accessing Windows DLLs is possible in D. This page should be a great place to start learning more:
> 
>   Writing Win32 DLLs in D
>   http://digitalmars.com/d/dll.html

That's about *writing* DLLs. Using them is much easier.
All you need to do is
(1) take the C header file (probably libsndfile.h), run htoD on it to make a D file (which will be called libsndfile.d).
(2) take the C import lib, and if it's a Microsoft COFF format library (almost all are), run coffimplib on it. Say this creates a file libsndfile.lib.

in libsndfile.d, add the line
pragma(lib, "libsndfile.lib");
so that you don't need to specify it on the command line.

Then your D program can just

import libsndfile;

Now go off and make some magic <g>.

P.S. you can download htod and coffimplib from the DigitalMars site.
Some links:
http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?DigitalMarsTools

Don Clugston wrote:
> nobody wrote:
>> cps wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I'm a C/C++ programmer. I'm very interested in D.
>>>
>>> At the moment my work requires the use of libsndfile
>>> (http://www.mega-nerd.com/libsndfile/). Am I right in thinking that I can
>>> access Windows .dlls from D? If so, is there an example of how to do this
>>> anywhere? Is this difficult to do?
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>>
>>> Chris
>>
>> You are correct that accessing Windows DLLs is possible in D. This page should be a great place to start learning more:
>>
>>   Writing Win32 DLLs in D
>>   http://digitalmars.com/d/dll.html
> 
> That's about *writing* DLLs. Using them is much easier.
> All you need to do is
> (1) take the C header file (probably libsndfile.h), run htoD on it to make a D file (which will be called libsndfile.d).
> (2) take the C import lib, and if it's a Microsoft COFF format library (almost all are), run coffimplib on it. Say this creates a file libsndfile.lib.
> 
> in libsndfile.d, add the line
> pragma(lib, "libsndfile.lib");
> so that you don't need to specify it on the command line.
> 
> Then your D program can just
> 
> import libsndfile;
> 
> Now go off and make some magic <g>.

Just a quick note--for pragma(lib) to work, you must build the module containing the pragma into your program.  Build does this automatically, but DMD/GDC do not :-)


Sean