Every few years I do a little test to see how much effort it
takes to get the ioquake3 [1] codebase set up in a way that I can
replace bits of it with D implementations and compile it all
together. Not because I plan to port the whole thing, but I'm
perennially curious how difficult it would be for someone to get
started on porting a complex C project to D piece by piece (the
way it should be done). I have to say, Rainer has made it easier
than ever on Windows with the new Visual D release [2].
So I generated a VS 2015 solution with the ioq3-premake-msvc
project [3], loaded it up, compiled it all to make sure it works
(ioq3 will find the Quake3 resources automatically if you have
Quake3 installed via Steam). Then I added a D file, picked a
function to reimplement in D, and built it again. This resulted
in a handful of linker errors because the runtime isn't linked in
automatically. Once I opened up the project properties and added
the path to dmd2/windows/lib32mscoff to the linker directories
and phobosm32mscoff.lib to the linker input, I had an instance of
Quake3 running with a D implementation of Sys_Milliseconds [4].
As easy as that. No writing up custom build scripts, no manually
adding D object files to the ioq3 project, or any of the other
approaches I've taken in the past. Awesome! I think I'll do a
write up on this for the D blog in the near future.
Great job, Rainer!
[1] https://ioquake3.org/
[2] http://forum.dlang.org/thread/oa3dp7$icu$1...@digitalmars.com
[3] https://github.com/jpcy/ioq3-premake-msvc
[4] http://i.imgur.com/VP0ibfH.png
