Last update October 30, 2012

Porting From C



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see NotesForProgrammersUsedTo/PlainC differences between C and D

Do you really need a full port?

The first thing to know is that D can call compiled C functions directly. So a full source port of the C code may not be necessary, and in fact it's rare to see C software fully ported directly to D. Instead people usually just do a header-only port, which is much less work. The most common exceptions are cases where the source code is relatively brief (like getopt, for instance).

There is a downside to header-only ports: the D interface to the C library will naturally be limited to just the types that C understands. For instance, you won't be able to call the C functions directly with D 'char[]' or 'string' types, because C requires 'char*' to be null-terminated, and D strings aren't always so. Thus another option worth considering is making a headers + wrappers port, that is, first port the C headers as-is, then create another layer on top of that that handles simple translations between D types and C types, like calling std.string.toStringz to convert a D string to a 'char*'.

Tools

The main tools available to assist in porting C header files to D are
  • htod - Walter Bright's tool which can handle some C code.
  • BCD - (Old) Gregor Richard's translation tool based on gcc-xml.
  • DStep - Jacob Carlborg's Clang-based tool which can also translate from Objective-C?.

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