This is a proof of concept for an Interface Description Language isomorphic with C for describing C11 ABI compatible APIs for The Machinery game engine.
The TMIDL parser is based on the Micro Parser Combinators
library, vendored in vendor/mpc.
It is desirable to describe APIs in a machine-readable format for generating bindings between languages, including necessary metadata beyond just the C ABI alone to generate these bindings correctly. However, writing describing these APIs in a custom DSL can be cumbersome and unclear, especially with large existing codebases.
TMIDL is a interface description language that compiles as standard C11 headers (isomorphic), while using naming convention, preprocessor directives, and macros to provide additional information.
It can be used to generate bindings for other languages, and to generate documentation. Additionally it is also a linter to ensure APIs conform to The Machinery code conventions.
TMIDL is isomorphic with C11, meaning all valid TMIDL can be compiled as C code for the purpose of using a described API. However, the inverse is not true, not all valid C11 code is valid TMIDL.
In addition to some language features not being supported, TMIDL treats preprocessor directives and macros as relevant metadata, and will for this reason parse them syntactically at the same time as the rest of the code. These are used as metadata information necessary to generate correct bindings. However, this means not all C preprocessor tricks can be supported.
This example reads in a TMIDL file and writes the file's data to console in human-readable form. This is not intended to be machine-readable, it's example API usage.
This example reads in a TMIDL file and writes the file's data to console in JSON format. This is an example of using the TMIDL API from other languages.
Licensed under either of
- Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
- MIT License (Expat) (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)
at your option.