interesting languages - D

Well, as you've guessed, so far I've not hit any big roadblocks, having downloaded the d compiler dmd, hello.d compiled and ran after editing a one line config file /etc/dmd.conf, even that is not really needed...

int main(char[][] args)
{
    printf("Hello World\n");
    printf("args.length = %d\n", args.length);
    for (int i = 0; i < args.length; i++) {
        printf("args[%d] = '%s'\n", 
		i, 
		cast(char *)args[i]);
    }
    return 0;
}

and can be compiled with the simple line:

#dmd -I/dmd/src/phobos hello.d

[suggested improvement from Jarret Billingsley] - which makes use of foreach and writefln, rather good ole printf()

int main(char[][] args)
{
    writefln("Hello World");
    writefln("args.length = ", args.length);
    foreach (uint i, char[] arg, args) {
	writefln("args[",i,'] = '%s'", arg);
    }
    return 0;
}

The compiler works pretty much the same way gcc does, using -lpthread (for linking in lib's), and -I for include paths.

After getting this far, without challenging myself too much, I decided to push things a bit, and look for a gui. It looks like the two most complete ones are probably Win32 Native bindings, and GTK (called DUI for some reason?)
You can find all of them on dsource.org.
The Gtk bindings pretty much compile as checked out from subversion, and the errors that do come up, are pretty obvious and easy to fix (eg. src/dui/Label.d has to be changed like this:

@@ -231,7 +231,7 @@
                GtkWidget *gtkO= gtk_label_get_mnemonic_widget(gtkW());
                if ( gtkO  is  null )
                {
-                       null;
+               	return  null;
                }
                return new Widget(gtkO);
        }

The compiler error was pretty obvious, what was wrong, what line/file etc.

To actually make it build involves building one other library, dool (also on dsource.org), and modifying the makefile.DUI to suite your enviroment, for me this meant these simple changes.

@@ -19,8 +19,8 @@
 ##########################
 COMP_dui = dmd
 COMP_FLAGS_dui =  -c -g -O -od../obj -op
-COMP_IMPORT_dui = -I/home/ruimt/devel/D1/Dool/src:
       /home/ruimt/dmd/src/phobos/:/home/ruimt/dmd/src/phobos
-LINK_LIBS_dui=-lphobos -lpthread -L/home/ruimt/devel/D1/Dool -ldool
+COMP_IMPORT_dui = -I/usr/src/dool/src:/dmd/src/phobos/:/dmd/src/phobos
+LINK_LIBS_dui=-lphobos -lpthread -L/usr/src/dool -ldool
 LINK_dui=ar rcs

I have a suspicion that the author doesnt manually edit the Makefiles and autogenerates the from his editor, as hardcoding locations is not really the best of ideas. Anyway after those small changes, he presto, the gtk demo, and hello world on gtk work!

Aparently this also works ok on Win32..

So I got Gtk's test application up and going, and still no big hastles...

Next what to do with this new toy.. Considering that Last time I got to this stage with PHP-Gtk, I ended up writing an editor, I was not that suprised that the author of the Gtk bindings had also written and editor based around the Scintilla widget.

Getting this working was a little more complex, more due to the fact that scintilla
doesnt build as a shared library by default.

This is the Makefile patch I ended up using, still a bit messy, and based of quite a bit of googling.

** DIFF SLIGHTLY BROKEN AS I'VE HAD TO WRAP IT TO FIT ON THE PAGE...
 @@ -7,7 +7,7 @@
 # To force GTK+ 2 build, define GTK2 on the make command line.
 # To force GTK+ 1 build, define GTK1 on the make command line.

-.SUFFIXES: .cxx .c .o .h .a
+.SUFFIXES: .cxx .c .o .h .a .so
 CC = g++
 CCOMP = gcc
 AR = ar
@@ -17,14 +17,15 @@
 RANLIB = ranlib
 endif

-COMPLIB=../bin/scintilla.a
+COMPLIB=../bin/libscintilla.a
+SHAREDLIB=../bin/libscintilla.so
+

 vpath %.h ../src ../include
 vpath %.cxx ../src

 INCLUDEDIRS=-I ../include -I ../src
-CXXBASEFLAGS=-Wall -Wno-missing-braces 
    -Wno-char-subscripts -DGTK -DSCI_LEXER $(INCLUDEDIRS)
-
+CXXBASEFLAGS=-Wall -Wno-missing-braces
    -Wno-char-subscripts -DGTK -DSCI_LEXER $(INCLUDEDIRS) -Dunix
 ifdef NOTHREADS
 THREADFLAGS=-DG_THREADS_IMPL_NONE
 else
@@ -34,20 +35,20 @@
 ifdef DEBUG
 CXXFLAGS=-DDEBUG -g $(CXXBASEFLAGS) $(THREADFLAGS)
 else
-CXXFLAGS=-DNDEBUG -Os $(CXXBASEFLAGS) $(THREADFLAGS)
+CXXFLAGS+=-DNDEBUG $(CXXBASEFLAGS) $(THREADFLAGS)
 endif

 # If explicit setting of GTK1 or GTK2 then use that else look for
 # pkg-config which is an OK indication that GTK2 is available
 ifdef GTK2
-CONFIGFLAGS=pkg-config --cflags gtk+-2.0
+CONFIGFLAGS=pkg-config --cflags gtk+-2.0 gthread-2.0 glib-2.0
 MARSHALLER=scintilla-marshal.o
 else
 ifdef GTK1
 CONFIGFLAGS=gtk-config --cflags
 else
 ifneq (,$(findstring /,$(shell whereis pkg-config)))
-CONFIGFLAGS=pkg-config --cflags gtk+-2.0
+CONFIGFLAGS=pkg-config --cflags gtk+-2.0 gthread-2.0 glib-2.0
 MARSHALLER=scintilla-marshal.o
 else
 CONFIGFLAGS=gtk-config --cflags
@@ -56,7 +57,11 @@
 endif

 .cxx.o:
-       $(CC) `$(CONFIGFLAGS)` $(CXXFLAGS) -c $<
+       $(CXX) `$(CONFIGFLAGS)` $(CXXFLAGS) -c $<
+.cxx.so:
+       $(CXX) -fPIC `$(CONFIGFLAGS)` $(CXXFLAGS) -o $@ -c $<
+
+
 .c.o:
        $(CCOMP) `$(CONFIGFLAGS)` $(CXXFLAGS) -w -c $<

@@ -70,24 +75,41 @@
 LexLout.o LexLua.o LexMatlab.o LexMetapost.o LexMMIXAL.o LexMPT.o LexMSSQL.o \
 LexNsis.o LexOthers.o LexPascal.o LexPB.o LexPerl.o LexPOV.o LexPS.o \
 LexPython.o LexRebol.o LexRuby.o LexScriptol.o LexSmalltalk.o LexSpecman.o \
-LexSQL.o LexTADS3.o LexTeX.o LexVB.o LexVerilog.o LexVHDL.o LexYAML.o
+LexSQL.o LexTADS3.o LexTeX.o LexVB.o LexVerilog.o LexVHDL.o LexYAML.o
 #--Autogenerated -- end of automatically generated section

-all: $(COMPLIB)
+all: static shared
+
+static: $(COMPLIB)
+shared: $(SHAREDLIB)
+
+install: install-shared
+       mkdir -p ${PREFIX}/include/scintilla
+       install -m 444 ../include/*.h ${PREFIX}/include/scintilla
+       install -m 444 ${COMPLIB} ${PREFIX}/lib
+
+install-shared:
+       install -m 444 ${SHAREDLIB}  ${PREFIX}/lib

 clean:
        rm -f *.o $(COMPLIB)

 deps:
-       $(CC) -MM `$(CONFIGFLAGS)` $(CXXFLAGS) *.cxx ../src/*.cxx >deps.mak
+       $(CXX) -MM `$(CONFIGFLAGS)` $(CXXFLAGS) *.cxx ../src/*.cxx >deps.mak

-$(COMPLIB): DocumentAccessor.o WindowAccessor.o 
    KeyWords.o StyleContext.o Document.o CallTip.o \
+LIBOBJS =  DocumentAccessor.o WindowAccessor.o 
    KeyWords.o StyleContext.o Document.o CallTip.o \
        ScintillaBase.o ContractionState.o Editor.o 
    ExternalLexer.o PropSet.o PlatGTK.o \
        KeyMap.o LineMarker.o ScintillaGTK.o CellBuffer.o ViewStyle.o \
-       RESearch.o Style.o Indicator.o AutoComplete.o UniConversion.o XPM.o \
-       $(MARSHALLER) $(LEXOBJS)
+       RESearch.o Style.o Indicator.o AutoComplete.o UniConversion.o XPM.o  
       $(LEXOBJS)
+
+$(COMPLIB): $(LIBOBJS)
        $(AR) rc $@ $^
        $(RANLIB) $@

+$(SHAREDLIB): $(addsuffix .so,$(basename $(LIBOBJS)))
+       $(CC) -shared -fPIC -o $@ -Wl,-soname,$(notdir $(SHAREDLIB)) \
+       `pkg-config --libs  gtk+-2.0 gthread-2.0 glib-2.0`  $^
+
+
 # Automatically generate header dependencies with "make deps"
 include deps.mak

After that, only one other small modification seems to be needed to scintilla/gtk/ScintillaGTK.cxx

@@ -47,7 +47,6 @@
 #include "gtk/gtkmarshal.h"
 #if GTK_MAJOR_VERSION >= 2
 #include "scintilla-marshal.h"
+#include "scintilla-marshal.c"
 #endif

 #ifdef SCI_LEXER

now running make will output a nice .so file.. - which appears to work..

The editor he had written is called leds, which again needs one or two extra libraries to build (all available on dsoure.org), Leds compiles pretty easily after modifying the Makefile to suite your enviroment.

The only small problem getting leds to work was more related to using the scintilla.so, which during the experimentation with the make file and patches above, proved difficult to test, as the Linker that leds/dui uses, currently ignores silently dl_error() messages, so I had to add a small printf to that code to see if I had built the scintilla.so correctly.

To try and get a better understanding of D and also curious to see how someone else had solve the same problem I had done all those years ago, I hacked a few features to leds. based on my knowledge of the lexer, I managed to add PHP syntax support, and attempted to tidy up the preference's definition code,
Having features like assert(), inside a methods pre-run area's made finding bugs alot easier..


I even found some code for a simple threaded Httpd server. that was ~ 100 lines, and worked pretty well..



The only snag I've found so far, is that googling for 'D' is not very efficient...