[midnite]

I'm just starting out in my journey of R&D/evaluation of using D as a possible future development platform for my team at work. Currently we do all our development in Visual Studio, using C/C++ (and C# for some tools), and it is definitely the 'comfort zone' for the team. I very much like the idea of Visual D, it would help make the shift to D a lot smoother.

One of the things that's important to us is being able to link against some existing C/C++ static libraries (built with VS, so PE COFF format). In some light testing I was able to link a D2 project with a C/C++ Static library project in VS/VisualD. I had to use the objconv.exe tool, as the Digital Mars tool coff2omf.exe seems to be too old to work with the newer libraries. Unfortunately, it looks like objconv will always strip out debugging information, and while I had successful link and execution, I could only debug the D code, there was no debugging information for the C/C++ code.

I suppose if the C/C++ code was in a DLL and referenced with D, things would work much better, but there are some cases where our applications really need to come as a single .exe and not have dependent .dlls come along for the ride.

Am I missing some sort of process or tool to make this all happen how I want?

For what it's worth, using GDC and GCC/MingW (TDM), I was able to build and debug a D/C/C++ mixed executable. I had to use GDB (though WinGDB works), and the downside is I'm not using VisualD (unless VisualD supports GDC??), and the DMD compiler is a bit more up to date, and active, than GDC.

I guess this may be more DMD specific, but the readers of this forum are much more likely to know the answer because the Visual Studio nature of the question

Thanks...

[sagitario]

Hi,

even if the object file conversion would work perfectly, the D runtime library depends on the C runtime library of the dmc compiler, so it will be troublesome to link it with C code that relies on another C runtime library.

Here's a discussion of trying to remove the dependency on the Digital Mars C library (snn.lib) http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/Linking_COFF_and_OMF_130260.html , but I'm not sure that attempt was successful.

So, if you have to statically link D and C code, I would recommend trying to compile the C code with dmc. You can still setup a VS project (probably makefile) to take advantage of intellisense and other VS features. This would also allow handling of the debug information by the converter to pdb.

[midnite]

Ah, now I see the posts of others trying to get the same results I'm looking for. I hope it gets resolved because that would surely help D adoption.

Thanks!