On Friday, 19 July 2013 at 15:39:36 UTC, Tove wrote:
On Friday, 19 July 2013 at 13:38:12 UTC, Chad Joan wrote:
Even with a conservative target like C89-only, there are still
an incredibly large number of extremely useful D features
(OOP, templates, scope(exit), CTFE, mixins, ranges,
op-overloading, etc) that DO come for free.
I love the idea behind xdc, but I would go with C99 instead,
even MS as the last vendor(?), with VS2013 now finally
committed to supporting C99, variable length arrays alone would
make it worth it.
I am, in fact, totally willing to make --emit=C99 do cool things
once I discover what those cool things are. Otherwise it will
probably emit code that is both C89 and C99 compliant.
I feel that most of the D features that can be implemented with a
C99 compiler can be implemented with C89 as well, and C89 might
give more reach into esoteric targets like microcontrollers or
legacy systems.
Maybe I should ask this: what D features are you afraid of losing
due to lowering into C89?
...
I hate to sour whatever cheerful expectations you might have,
but, AFAIK, D doesn't have VLAs. Consequently, I don't think xdc
would need them. I hear that VLA support is becoming optional in
C11 as well, which doesn't bode well for its potential existance
in the future, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable-length_array
"Programming languages that support VLAs include [...] C99 (and
subsequently in C11 relegated to a conditional feature which
implementations aren't required to support; ..."
It is important to note that even if D /did/ have VLAs, then it
would be possible to lower them into other constructs:
void foo(int n)
{
char[n] vla;
...
}
-= can be emulated by =-
void foo(int n)
{
char[] vla = (cast(char*)std.c.stdlib.malloc(n))[0..n];
scope(exit) std.c.stdlib.free(vla.ptr);
...
}
This would be important for emitting to any language without
VLAs. It could be used if someone wanted to add VLAs to xdc as
an (off-by-default) experimental feature. And of course it
should use "new T[n]" with core.memory.GC.free if the array
contains pointers, or stdlib is unavailable (ex: Java). I would
also expect --emit=C99 to avoid the heap allocation. alloca
might be usable with C89 in some cases, but is very dangerous (in
my experience).
----
I had a friend of mine who is an expert C programmer poke me
about this C89 vs C99 thing as well. It's strange to me because
I thought that emitting C89 was actually a strong selling point:
you're getting D which is so much more than C99, AND it will
reach all of the old C89 compilers.
If there are still things that you (community inclusive) are
afraid of missing, then I am pretty willing to do C99 instead and
skip C89. I will need to know what they are though, or it won't
make a difference anyway (I can't implement what I don't know
about!).
HTH.
