The answer is that Solod breaks with Go semantics here: it just makes defer block-scoped (and unavailable in for/if blocks, which I don't quite get).
https://github.com/solod-dev/solod/blob/main/doc/spec.md#def...
Would have been a lot more useful if it tried to match the Go behavior and threw a compiler error if it couldn't, e.g. when you defer in a loop.
Is this just for people who prefer Go syntax over C syntax?
In C you can allocate dynamically on the stack using alloca or a VLA.
Spatial memory safety is nice but it's the temporal safety that worries me most, in nontrivial C codebases.
SWIG[0] is a viable option for incorporating C code as well.
what's the benefit? for loops?
I wonder if it could be integrated with https://github.com/tidwall/neco, which has Go-like coroutines, channels, and synchronization methods.
But in general this kind of thing is very unreliable for any non-trivial code without a lot of manual work, so a better approach could be to compile to WebAssembly which can be translated into C
It’s a mix of go and rust syntax that translates to C
[1]: https://codapi.org/
Sure when I started Go there were Go routines plastered everywhere. And now I think harder: “do I really need a go routine here?”
> To keep things simple, there are no channels, goroutines, closures, or generics.
Sure, slices and multiple return values are nice, but it's not what makes Go good. When people think about Go they usually think about channels and goroutines. YMMV
While I do kind of get what the appeal and target audience is supposed to be, I absolutely don't get why you'd choose a subset and still have it behave differently than the Go counterpart. For me that destroys the whole purpose of the project.
I was pleasantly surprised to discover, however, that C code can be readily translated to D.
In general, if the guts of Foo are similar to those of Bar, translating Foo to Bar is fairly easy.
If Foo has additional guts, as in the C++-to-ℂ translator, translating those parts can lead to hard to read code.
In the C-to-D translator case, it’s not Foo that has additional guts, though, but Bar.
Then, a reasonable 1:1 transaction is easy. Doing it in idiomatic style can still be hard, though. For example D has garbage collection, classes and inheritance. I doubt the readily translation of C to D will replace C equivalents (e.g. a garbage collector written in C that’s part of the code) by those where possible.