On 22/05/10 17:42, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
- Interfacing to C libraries is now overly complex thanks to const
correctness. After updating all the function signatures I found phobos
was completely lacking the functions to convert between C and D strings
of varying constness or with different encodings (char/wchar/dchar).. I
ended up writing my own functions
Could you please give more detail on that? There should be essentially
no problem with using C-style strings with D regardless of constness.
extern(C)void someFunc(char*);
There is no function in phobos which will allow me to call this function
using a D string, toStringz() gives:
test.d(4): Error: function test.someFunc (char*) is not callable using
argument types (const(char)*)
Unless I cast away const, which isn't pretty if you've got a lot of
these functions, unless you write a wrapper for each one (my current
hack). to!() doesn't support it at all, and I can't find another method
in phobos for it.
extern(C)void someFunc(wchar*);
This is impossible with phobos, there's no function to convert a D
string to wchar*, not even one where I could cast away constness. This
includes dchar* too.
- to!() didn't work in most cases where I tried to use it, I ended up
writing my own conversion functions
to is deliberately defined to be restrictive; parse is more forgiving.
Anyway, I'd be glad to improve to if you gave me a few hints.
Any of the above conversions would be nice, although I appreciate that
there's no way to tell if it's a C style string or a pointer to a single
char. There were several other situations which I worked around but
didn't note down, so I can't list them here.
