On 10/13/22 3:18 PM, Dennis wrote:
The output is supposed to be a good starting point for manual translation: tedious syntax changes are done for you, but you're left with the task of translating (non-trivial) macros, fixing errors because of D's stricter type system, and other misc things ctod doesn't translate properly yet (see also [issues on GitHub](https://github.com/dkorpel/ctod/issues) 🙂).
I want to say, this has been incredibly useful to me! I spent many hours translating one file in raylib, which was about 6000 lines (it's still not completely finished, but only because I'm not currently supporting WASM). Dealing with all the rote tedious issues was the biggest pain.
There are tens of thousands of lines of code left to translate, and most of them reside in header-only libraries that raylib sniped from other projects (seen in the "external" directory). In a few hours time, with ctod, I've already translated 3 of these files, and the result means less requirements for C building.
My original plan was to just leave the internal stuff as C since it's only used internally for raylib (e.g. audio file reading, compression, etc.). I was going to actually ship binary libraries of the internal C stuff for various architectures so you could just use dub.
But now with this tool, I think we have a shot of making a complete port, so no external tools or dependencies are needed!
With the rise of ImportC the use cases for this tool decrease, but in case you still find yourself translating C to D, I hope this is of use to you!
I want to say something about this. ImportC is great if you want to use an existing library. But it still means you are using a C library. e.g. raylib uses null-terminated strings for all text processing. It uses malloc/free for memory management (and it is actually pretty full of buffer overflow possibilities, as a typical C project might be). Not to mention the lack of overloads...
With ImportC I might be able to just use raylib with it's current C API. But with ctod, I can build upon raylib to make a D library that is even more fun and intuitive to use.
Thanks Dennis! -Steve
