error: unknown type name 'bool'

[amreus]

Non-progammer and D newbie here. I thought I would ask here before reporting as a bug.

Using dstep v1.0.0 on Windows 10 64-bit, dstep is failing to convert any of the C header files (*.h) that use a bool type giving the error:

error: unknown type name 'bool'

Header files that do not use the bool type convert with no errors.

I'm not sure where the problem lies since it seems unlikely that a fundamental type would be unknown to dstep. I assume it's something in my system or setup.

Any guidance is appreciated, thanks.

[jacob-carlborg]

Do you have an example of some code that DStep fails to convert? Also how you run the DStep command.

C doesn't have a type called bool. It has a type called _Bool and the stdbool.h header file provides an alias called bool. This type was added in C99. The stdbool.h file is a compiler internal header file which is bundled with DStep. It should work out of the box. The only reason I can think of is that DStep defaults to an older standard of C, were this type is not available. You can use the -std=<standard> flag to specify the C standard, see [1] for more information. DStep uses Clang under the hood, any flags that can be passed to Clang can be passed to DStep.

[1] https://clang.llvm.org/docs/CommandGuide/clang.html#cmdoption-std

[amreus]

I was just browsing the README. The section on Windows mentions some requirements. It is not clear if the requirements are for running dstep or building?

If any of this matter: I do not have LLVM installed. I do have VS2019 Community edition installed, but it is not on my PATH by default. I also have gcc 9.3.0 installed and is on my PATH by default (installed using the scoop package manager.)

[jacob-carlborg]

When I added #include <stdbool.h> to the example.h file, it did work.

That's actually expected, now when I think about it. The problem with C and the preprocessor is that it's designed to work on a complete translation unit. DStep on the other hand is designed to work on a single header file. What happens here is that most likely there's another header file included before example.h which includes <stdbool.h>. The declarations in <stdbool.h> then becomes available to example.h as well. In my opinion that is a broken design of the library.

They way you can fix this is, as you mentioned, is to include <stdbool.h>. Or if you don't want to/can't modify the header file you can use the -include flag to force include a header file before the one that is currently being processed. In this case the <stdbool.h> is shipped with the compiler and not the SDK. In the case of DStep it's embedded inside the executable, so it's unfortunately not accessible from the file system. The simplest way is to copy the file from the DStep repository [1] and save it somewhere on your computer. There's some more information about this at the bottom on the readme (the last bullet point) [2].

[1] https://github.com/jacob-carlborg/dstep/blob/master/resources/stdbool.h
[2] https://github.com/jacob-carlborg/dstep#limitationsknown-issues

[amreus]

@jacob-carlborg Thank you for the responses. I have managed to get things working mostly.

This Github repo is what I am actually attempting. Running run-dstep.bat should build all the .d files.

[jacob-carlborg]

I see you've manually defined the bool symbol. I guess that works too.

[amreus]

I see you've manually defined the bool symbol. I guess that works too.

I could not get -include syntax to work, so I looked for an alternative. Thanks again for all your help.