On Thursday, 21 August 2014 at 20:43:53 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
wrote:
On Thursday, 21 August 2014 at 20:33:56 UTC, Walter Bright
wrote:
On 8/21/2014 11:54 AM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
LOL. Yeah, well, it would be ni going to support C+ce if we
could get an actual
list of the C++ features that D currently supports somewhere
(and how to use
them if it's not obvious). You've been doing so much great
work on that that I
have no clue what the current state of things is. For
instance, this is the
first I've heard of anything about template support; I'd
thought that we were
never going to support templates. Is it just for name
mangling or for actually
compiling them?
The thing is, while the code was there, there wasn't a single
test case for it in the test suite. Furthermore, at least for
Elf, there was no support for the special mangling done for
::std:: stuff.
The thing is, modern C++ practice makes heavy use of std
types. Having an interface to C++ code is fairly unusable
unless D can also interface to std::string, std::vector, and a
few others.
The first step is to support the mangling of them. Then, try
to construct a "workalike" on the D side that follows D rules,
and yet is able to seamlessly interact with the corresponding
C++ code.
We'll see how far we can get with that, and then evaluate what
to do next.
There are no plans for actually compiling C++ code with a D
compiler. The plan is for support like we do for C - have a .d
"header" file for it.
Well, I wouldn't have expected us to be compiling C++ per se,
but previously, it seemed like the party line was that we
wouldn't be supporting C++ templates at all because of how hard
they were and because we don't want a C++ compiler in the D
compiler. I'm certainly all for anything we can do for C++
compatability without going off the deep end. I just don't hear
much about what we're actually doing right now. So, I really
have no idea what the current status of that is. With what was
said at dconf and comments like these, it seems like we're
making huge progress in comparison to where we were, and as far
as I can tell, about the only way to hear about it is to either
pay a lot of attention to dmd pulls or to see an occasonal
comment from Daniel talking about it or from someone who's
paying close attention to what he's up to. So, at some point in
the near future, it would be nice if there were somewhere that
actually said what D can actually do with C++ now, even if that
doesn't include everything that's going to be coming or if much
of it is marked as experimental and relatively untested.
- Jonathan M Davis
It would be nice to have a page to link to when questions come up
on Reddit about compatibility with C++. That page should also
have information about avoiding the garbage collector and the
status of GC removal from the standard library.
