ImportC can now automatically run the preprocessor (page 8)

On Tuesday, 17 May 2022 at 05:11:01 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:

On 5/16/2022 2:52 AM, deadalnix wrote:

I don't understand where this is going at all. At first, I thought that this was able being able to import c (as the name would suggest), which seems super useful, but now it seems to be evolving into a full blow C compiler and I have no idea why I would want that. I already have several on my machine, and they are extremely high quality.

People can and do put the full C language into .h files (for example, functions that are expected to be inlined).

Yeah, header-only libraries are very popular among users, since it helps keep binary sizes under control, so authors shove as much of the functionality as possible into the header files

May 17, 2022

Re: ImportC can now automatically run the preprocessor

Posted by Paulo Pinto
in reply to Tejas

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Paulo Pinto

Posted in reply to Tejas

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On Tuesday, 17 May 2022 at 07:15:52 UTC, Tejas wrote:

On Tuesday, 17 May 2022 at 05:11:01 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:

On 5/16/2022 2:52 AM, deadalnix wrote:

People can and do put the full C language into .h files (for example, functions that are expected to be inlined).

Yeah, header-only libraries are very popular among users, since it helps keep binary sizes under control, so authors shove as much of the functionality as possible into the header files

Yeah, because linkers and LTO are yet to be invented.

On Monday, 16 May 2022 at 03:12:47 UTC, Walter Bright wrote: > On 5/15/2022 6:41 PM, Adam D Ruppe wrote: >> On Monday, 16 May 2022 at 01:05:33 UTC, Walter Bright wrote: >>> But what is missing is a compelling use case for it? >> >> It is the only way I've seen that would let you ACTUALLY use full C APIs. > > This is replacing C #define's with D constructions, right? > > You're right, ImportC does not do that at the moment. However, it's always been the plan for it to gather up all the #define's, and replace the ones that can be replaced with D constructs, and ignore the rest. That will be very handy of course and some users may heavily demand it, but at the before-ImportC times, when I dreamt of having a C frontend integrated with D compiler, I assumed it'd be good enough if I could just write a one line wrapper function in the C file to call the ugly macro, for anything that's not auto-convertible to plain enum constant.

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