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digitalmars.D - Will I try again? and also C header files.

reply "SeanVn" <evospice yahoo.com> writes:
I looked at the D programming language a few years ago and though 
it was good.  Then I ran into trouble.  The language was in a 
state of flux.  I would write code and with the next version of D 
it would no longer work.  The same thing was happening to people 
who were writing tools such as IDE's for D and I guess most of 
them just gave up.
That was then.
I hope now things have settled down. I will look at the language 
for a couple of days.  I presume I now only have to look at D2 
and Phobos and not the previous 4 way split of D1/D2/Phobos/Tango.
I have a specific engineering application I want to develop. I 
want to pick a programming language that will give me the 
cleanest and most maintainable code possible.  I want to use the 
IUP GUI library.  That is a shared library that has C headers.  I 
presume I will be able to call the dll functions easily in D2?  
Maybe I will only have to make some minimal changes to the C 
header files to get them to work with D2?
May 31 2013
next sibling parent reply Jacob Carlborg <doob me.com> writes:
On 2013-05-31 09:18, SeanVn wrote:

 I looked at the D programming language a few years ago and though it was
 good.  Then I ran into trouble.  The language was in a state of flux.  I
 would write code and with the next version of D it would no longer
 work.  The same thing was happening to people who were writing tools
 such as IDE's for D and I guess most of them just gave up.
 That was then.
 I hope now things have settled down. I will look at the language for a
 couple of days.  I presume I now only have to look at D2 and Phobos and
 not the previous 4 way split of D1/D2/Phobos/Tango.
 I have a specific engineering application I want to develop. I want to
 pick a programming language that will give me the cleanest and most
 maintainable code possible.  I want to use the IUP GUI library.  That is
 a shared library that has C headers.  I presume I will be able to call
 the dll functions easily in D2? Maybe I will only have to make some
 minimal changes to the C header files to get them to work with D2?


You need to convert the C header files to D modules. Or the actual 
declarations you want to use. There's a tool available to do that:

https://github.com/jacob-carlborg/dstep

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg
May 31 2013
parent reply =?UTF-8?B?UsOpbXkgTW91w6t6YQ==?= <remy.moueza gmail.com> writes:
Concerning dstep,

I compiled it recently (Ubuntu 12.04 32 bits system) and it wasn't as 
straightforward as it was described in the README file, nor was it that 
complicated to have it work. I'll outline my experience below for those 
interested.

first step that needed some care was the compilation of Tango-D2: I 
downloaded the last version that did not compiled on dmd 2.060 but did 
well on dmd 2.061 (and fast).

When I got dstep compiled, I forgot to run `sudo ldconfig` so that dstep 
could find libclang.so (this is not a bug nor an annoyance but it may be 
confusing at first).

Then, (dstep or rather) clang stopped with an error telling me it could 
not find "stddef.h". A quick google search seemed to indicate that I 
needed to upgrade from llvm-3.1 to llvm-3.2 to automagically solve that 
problem.
However, what I really had to do was to find out the include path which 
on my system is :
  /usr/local/include
  /usr/include
  /usr/include/i386-linux-gnu/

llvm/clang
  /usr/lib/gcc/i686-linux-gnu/4.6/include/
  /usr/lib/gcc/i686-linux-gnu/4.6/include-fixed/

So I ran dstep like this:
$ ~/dev/dee/dstep/bin/dstep mongoose.h -o mongoose_d.d -v 
-I/usr/local/include -I/usr/include -I/usr/include/i386-linux-gnu/ 
-I/home/ray/apps/llmv-3.2/include/clang 
-I/usr/lib/gcc/i686-linux-gnu/4.6/include/ 
-I/usr/lib/gcc/i686-linux-gnu/4.6/include-fixed/


I noticed in the output file that an embedded "typedef'ed" struct was 
not handled very well but fixing this manually went really quick.

Using the output, my Mongoose test program no longer crashes with 
segfaults due to a mysterious void *user_data pointer being always set 
to 0x4 in my callback function even when set otherwise at initialization.

In brief: dstep is a huge improvement over manually writing a D header 
interface.

As for IUP, since I happen to have iup.h on my system, I tried it with 
dstep. The command line had just to be adjusted, adding the path to the 
include directory like '-I/path/to/iup/include/dir' or '-I`pwd`' when 
generating directly within the directory.



On 05/31/2013 10:52 AM, Jacob Carlborg wrote:

 On 2013-05-31 09:18, SeanVn wrote:

 I looked at the D programming language a few years ago and though it was
 good.  Then I ran into trouble.  The language was in a state of flux.  I
 would write code and with the next version of D it would no longer
 work.  The same thing was happening to people who were writing tools
 such as IDE's for D and I guess most of them just gave up.
 That was then.
 I hope now things have settled down. I will look at the language for a
 couple of days.  I presume I now only have to look at D2 and Phobos and
 not the previous 4 way split of D1/D2/Phobos/Tango.
 I have a specific engineering application I want to develop. I want to
 pick a programming language that will give me the cleanest and most
 maintainable code possible.  I want to use the IUP GUI library.  That is
 a shared library that has C headers.  I presume I will be able to call
 the dll functions easily in D2? Maybe I will only have to make some
 minimal changes to the C header files to get them to work with D2?


 You need to convert the C header files to D modules. Or the actual
 declarations you want to use. There's a tool available to do that:

 https://github.com/jacob-carlborg/dstep
May 31 2013
parent reply Jacob Carlborg <doob me.com> writes:
On 2013-05-31 23:08, Rémy Mouëza wrote:

 Concerning dstep,

 I compiled it recently (Ubuntu 12.04 32 bits system) and it wasn't as
 straightforward as it was described in the README file, nor was it that
 complicated to have it work. I'll outline my experience below for those
 interested.

 first step that needed some care was the compilation of Tango-D2: I
 downloaded the last version that did not compiled on dmd 2.060 but did
 well on dmd 2.061 (and fast).


Ok, I see. I haven't updated the readme. The build script will 
automatically try to use DMD 2.061 if you have DVM installed.

https://github.com/jacob-carlborg/dvm


 When I got dstep compiled, I forgot to run `sudo ldconfig` so that dstep
 could find libclang.so (this is not a bug nor an annoyance but it may be
 confusing at first).


The last command in the instructions for Clang it copies libclang.so to 
the folder of DStep. This will make the "sudo ldconfig" step 
unnecessary. I didn't even know about it.


 Then, (dstep or rather) clang stopped with an error telling me it could
 not find "stddef.h". A quick google search seemed to indicate that I
 needed to upgrade from llvm-3.1 to llvm-3.2 to automagically solve that
 problem.


Yeah, I think I had a similar issue. I guess it's time to update to 3.2 
or rather 3.3 when it's released.


 However, what I really had to do was to find out the include path which
 on my system is :
   /usr/local/include
   /usr/include
   /usr/include/i386-linux-gnu/

 llvm/clang
   /usr/lib/gcc/i686-linux-gnu/4.6/include/
   /usr/lib/gcc/i686-linux-gnu/4.6/include-fixed/

 So I ran dstep like this:
 $ ~/dev/dee/dstep/bin/dstep mongoose.h -o mongoose_d.d -v
 -I/usr/local/include -I/usr/include -I/usr/include/i386-linux-gnu/
 -I/home/ray/apps/llmv-3.2/include/clang
 -I/usr/lib/gcc/i686-linux-gnu/4.6/include/
 -I/usr/lib/gcc/i686-linux-gnu/4.6/include-fixed/


I think I just copied the file to /usr/local/include


 I noticed in the output file that an embedded "typedef'ed" struct was
 not handled very well but fixing this manually went really quick.


Could you please file a bug for this. With the C input you used, the 
output from DStep and the expected output.


 Using the output, my Mongoose test program no longer crashes with
 segfaults due to a mysterious void *user_data pointer being always set
 to 0x4 in my callback function even when set otherwise at initialization.


Great.


 In brief: dstep is a huge improvement over manually writing a D header
 interface.


That's really great to here.


 As for IUP, since I happen to have iup.h on my system, I tried it with
 dstep. The command line had just to be adjusted, adding the path to the
 include directory like '-I/path/to/iup/include/dir' or '-I`pwd`' when
 generating directly within the directory.


Cool. Could you please file a bug for all this, so it's not forgotten.

BTW, there are pre-compiled binaries available:

https://github.com/jacob-carlborg/dstep/downloads

I forgot to add that to the readme.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg
Jun 01 2013
parent reply "SeanVN" <evospice yahoo.com> writes:
Thanks for all the information. It seems that D2 meets all my 
requirements.  I have been reading some of the documentation.  It 
is a extensive language and there is definitely a learning curve 
for me to overcome.  That is manageable though.
I looked at the Go programming language. The core ideas in that 
language are good but it is practically useless for designing 
desktop applications. The specifics of the standard libraries and 
the rejection of shared libraries mean it is consigned to being a 
web-server scripting language only.
I am happy that D2 allows me to use 79/80 bit reals, unlike 
almost every other programming language these days which only 
allow access to 64 bit floating point numbers.
Jun 02 2013
parent "John Colvin" <john.loughran.colvin gmail.com> writes:
On Monday, 3 June 2013 at 03:36:52 UTC, SeanVN wrote:

 Thanks for all the information. It seems that D2 meets all my 
 requirements.  I have been reading some of the documentation.  
 It is a extensive language and there is definitely a learning 
 curve for me to overcome.  That is manageable though.
 I looked at the Go programming language. The core ideas in that 
 language are good but it is practically useless for designing 
 desktop applications. The specifics of the standard libraries 
 and the rejection of shared libraries mean it is consigned to 
 being a web-server scripting language only.
 I am happy that D2 allows me to use 79/80 bit reals, unlike 
 almost every other programming language these days which only 
 allow access to 64 bit floating point numbers.


That's great to hear :)

Feel free to post for help with any problems in 
http://forum.dlang.org/group/digitalmars.D.learn
Jun 03 2013
prev sibling next sibling parent "John Colvin" <john.loughran.colvin gmail.com> writes:
On Friday, 31 May 2013 at 07:18:38 UTC, SeanVn wrote:

 I hope now things have settled down.


They have, considerably.



 I will look at the language for a couple of days.  I presume I 
 now only have to look at D2 and Phobos and not the previous 4 
 way split of D1/D2/Phobos/Tango.


Correct



 I have a specific engineering application I want to develop. I 
 want to pick a programming language that will give me the 
 cleanest and most maintainable code possible.  I want to use 
 the IUP GUI library.  That is a shared library that has C 
 headers.  I presume I will be able to call the dll functions 
 easily in D2?


Yes, shouldn't be any problems there.



 Maybe I will only have to make some minimal changes to the C 
 header files to get them to work with D2?


As Jacob mentioned, there are tools to do this for you. Even 
without them though, simple header files are pretty trivial to 
convert.
May 31 2013
prev sibling parent "Rikki Cattermole" <alphaglosined gmail.com> writes:
On Friday, 31 May 2013 at 07:18:38 UTC, SeanVn wrote:

 I looked at the D programming language a few years ago and 
 though it was good.  Then I ran into trouble.  The language was 
 in a state of flux.  I would write code and with the next 
 version of D it would no longer work.  The same thing was 
 happening to people who were writing tools such as IDE's for D 
 and I guess most of them just gave up.
 That was then.
 I hope now things have settled down. I will look at the 
 language for a couple of days.  I presume I now only have to 
 look at D2 and Phobos and not the previous 4 way split of 
 D1/D2/Phobos/Tango.
 I have a specific engineering application I want to develop. I 
 want to pick a programming language that will give me the 
 cleanest and most maintainable code possible.  I want to use 
 the IUP GUI library.  That is a shared library that has C 
 headers.  I presume I will be able to call the dll functions 
 easily in D2?  Maybe I will only have to make some minimal 
 changes to the C header files to get them to work with D2?


I have some where floating around static bindings to IUP.
Includes macros converted as functions as well.
https://bitbucket.org/alphaglosined/libglosined
Take a look under iup directory.
May 31 2013