On Sunday, 10 October 2021 at 23:11:56 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
On 10/5/2021 10:36 AM, ag0aep6g wrote:
it's also true that Walter prioritizes new features instead
(ImportC is the latest fad)
ImportC resolves a long standing serious issue where multiple
other substantial attempts at solving it have fallen short over
the years. Unfortunately, ImportC is useless if it only half
works. It has to work with existing C headers, which is why I'm
concentrating on it to get to that point. Lack of ImportC has
wasted a *lot* of developer time, making it a high leverage
investment of time.
Just think of all the time lost doing manual conversion of .h
files, and then doing them again and again as they evolve. Then
not one, not two, but *three* different automated programs were
developed to try and resolve this (one of which I wrote). Then
think of all the projects *not* done because of the barrier of
trying to deal with several thousand lines of .h files.
The Diemos project was an effort to crowdsource conversion of
.h files to D, but it just was not adequate.
In summary, ImportC is totally worth the effort. I should have
done it 15 years ago.
I agree 100%, ImportC is a needed feature
Zig people understood that and made it one of their strength
C ecosystem is way too big to just ignore it, we seen it with
rust, people are not interested in rewriting their libraries in
the *insert what's trending* language, they want to take their
luggage with them, and they are right, ImportC enables that
