• Vincent Lang (19/21) Mar 04 2005 I guess D also wants to support libraries written in D, of course
• <Altair_liu hotmail.com> (2/7) Mar 04 2005

Vincent Lang <jvjgh web.de> writes:

I guess D also wants to support libraries written in D, of course 
exporting D language bindings (with classes and all).

How does D do this? I hope it doesn't like C++, because there you have a 
big mess. I.e. you must be very careful in modifying existing classes to 
not to break binary compatibility to earlier versions of a library. Look 
on this:

http://2f.ru/holy-wars/fbc.html

Please note what braindead tricks these poor C++ developers have to do 
to keep it upwards compatible. I think these reserved virtual functions 
are especially funny...

Now, with D this could get even worser, since the D manual says:

 The D compiler is free to rearrange the order of fields in a class to 
 optimally pack them in an implementation-defined manner.

So D libraries couldn't get ever compatible to anything, since the 
concrete layout could even depend from compiler switches.

How is this solved? Is it solved at all?

Btw: I also saw there seem to be "import modules". Hm, look like header 
files. My proposal would be to generate these modules from the library 
binaries, or better: let the compiler access these binaries instead of 
parsing the import module.

Vincent

<Altair_liu hotmail.com> writes:

I think this is very important and convenient for developers.

"Vincent Lang" <jvjgh web.de> write :d0a6lk$1lqe$1 digitaldaemon.com...

 Btw: I also saw there seem to be "import modules". Hm, look like header 
 files. My proposal would be to generate these modules from the library 
 binaries, or better: let the compiler access these binaries instead of 
 parsing the import module.

 Vincent