What do you think about a bindings generator tool?

[ghost]

Please take FreeBASIC's fbfrog as an example:

https://github.com/freebasic/fbfrog

Adept is very similar to FreeBASIC as both compile to C and use a C compiler to make the final binaries. I think implement such a tool for Adept will be much easier than FreeBASIC as Adept is already using LLVM. What do you think about using something like libclang to parse the C/C++ headers to generate bindings for Adept?

[IsaacShelton]

Yes that could be very nice.

One thing with automatically translating C/C++ headers though, is it's pretty much impossible to handle preprocessor macros correctly. You either have to preprocess it yourself, or rely on an existing C compiler which strips out all of the conditional compilation which we probably want to keep.

A lot of the translation can't be done by looking at the source code alone, you have to know the context around why something is being used. For example, #ifdef could be used for conditional compilation based on platform, conditional complication based on flag, conditional source code inclusion, conditional compilation based on a legacy symbol, and many other possibilities.

But yes, something simple maybe, with libclang to start, could be nice to have

[ghost]

fbfrog is not 100% automation. It's only a helper. Finally, you still need to step in and done what it's unable to do.

[ghost]

One thing I forgot is the preprocessor feature of FreeBASIC is very similar to C. This is the reason why most of the time fbfrog could map 1:1 from C to FreeBASIC. Adept's preprocessor feature is on AST level and not simply text substitution like C and FreeBASIC.

[ghost]

@IsaacShelton Please consider adding something like fbfrog. Adept's preprocessor feature is not the same as C's, but Adept has generics as the workaround (please correct me if $T is really called generics or not). fbfrog itself doesn't make use of libclang or other advanced C/C++ parsing libraries. It parses C and C++ directly on its own (of course, it can't be as accurate as using these libraries, but it works surprisingly well). You are a compiler developer, so implementing something like fbfrog is totally doable for you. Something like fbfrog is not perfect, but it really helps. The key is not 100% accurate auto-translation (this is impossible), but something good enough to aid the human translator.

[ghost]

fbfrog is designed to work only on headers, but I have also used it to aid the translation of source files. It's very good at mapping C syntax to FreeBASIC syntax. As far as the codes that it couldn't translate, as I recall, it simply commented them out and left the notes that it couldn't translate them.

[IsaacShelton]

I'm pretty busy right now, but I'll look into it when I have some time