Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by sargun 2757 days ago
One of the nice aspects of D is that it interfaces with C++ really nicely. I'm not overly familiar with how Rust handles this, as the last time I tried to glue together Rust and C++ was more than a year ago, and the tooling was in evolution.

From Go / CGo, it can be pretty scary to interface with native C++ code, and it requires lots of annoying boilerplate.
2 comments
WalterBright 2757 days ago
"C++ has a very complex ABI, and the Rust ABI is not frozen. However, both C++ and Rust support functions that use the C ABI. Therefore, interoperability between C++ and Rust involves writing things in such a way that C++ sees Rust code as C code and Rust sees C++ code as C code."

https://hsivonen.fi/modern-cpp-in-rust/

link
hardwaresofton 2757 days ago
Context: this poster is likely Walter Bright the creator and first implementer of D lang itself.

Cool to know you also read that article about C++ in rust (I personally read a little bit then left because trying to interface with C++ from rust wasn't a problem I had), but I guess it's obvious that you would.

link
WalterBright 2757 days ago
> is likely

Probably 100%

link
arunc 2757 days ago
I've written wrappers for C++ libraries to work with D and it's _very_ easy. To work with C++ classes in D, I created factory methods that created/destroyed them with C ABI and used/disposed them respectively.

Working with C is even more easier. There is no FFI, etc. Just use Dstep[1] and get going. Or use dpp[2].

[1] https://github.com/jacob-carlborg/dstep

[2] https://github.com/atilaneves/dpp

link
WalterBright 2757 days ago
Up until quite recently, while the front end of D was written in D, the back end was in C++ (more precisely, C with classes, as it is fairly auld skool).

It's now finally pretty much all in D, and I've been piece by piece refactoring it into more idiomatic D.

link