jank is C++

i commented on reddit (and got promptly downvoted) but since i think jank's author is around here (and hopefully is receptive to constructive criticism): the CppInterOp approach to cpp interop is completely janky (no pun intended). the approach literally string munges cpp and then parses/interprets it to emit ABI compliant calls. there's no reason to do this except that libclang currently doesn't support any other way. that's not jank's fault but it could be "fixed" in libclang. at a minimum you could use https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/blob/main/clang/lib/Cod... to emit the code based on clang ast. at a maximum would be to use something like

https://github.com/Mr-Anyone/abi

or this if/when it comes to fruition

https://discourse.llvm.org/t/llvm-introduce-an-abi-lowering-...

to generate ABI compliant calls/etc for cpp libs.

note, i say all this with maximum love in my heart for a language that would have first class cpp interop - i would immediately become jank's biggest proponent/user if its cpp interop were robust.

EDIT: for people wanting/needing receipts, you can skim through https://github.com/compiler-research/CppInterOp/blob/main/li...

> the CppInterOp approach to cpp interop is completely janky (no pun intended). the approach literally string munges cpp and then parses/interprets it to emit ABI compliant calls.

So, I agree that this sounds janky as heck. My question is: besides sounding janky as heck, is there something wrong with this? Is it slow/unreliable?

i mean it's as prone to error as any other thing that relies on string munging. it's probably not that much slower than the alternative i proposed - because the trampolines/wrappers are jitted and then reused - but it's just not robust enough that i would ever imagine building a prod system on top of it (eg using cppyy in prod) let alone baking it into my language/runtime.

The delta between the title and the content gave me extreme pause, thanks for sharing that there's, uh, worse problems.

I'm a bit surprised I've seen two articles about jank here the last 2 days if these are exemplars of the technical approach and communication style. Seems like that wouldn't be enough to get on people's radars.