C libraries with single header AND source file

[acisternino]

Hi,

I am trying to develop, within nelua-decl, bindings for Argtable. This library comes as a single "amalgamated" C file plus the accompanying header file.
For reference, similar libraries are mjson and mpc.

So far I have, amongst others, the following section in the bindings' .lua file:

nldecl.prepend_code = [=[
##[[
cinclude 'argtable3.h'
if not ARGTABLE_NO_IMPL then
  cinclude 'argtable3.c'
end
]]
]=]

There are, however, a few things I don't understand:

How am I supposed to handle the C files (both .c and .h) together in my project?

I have placed argtable3.c and argtable3.h in a subdirectory (clibs) that I want to be used by the nelua compiler.

I have tried the -L option and it didn't work (I think that's only for nelua modules).
Then I tried --cflags and I tried to pass -Iclibs but I couldn't find a way to have it accepted by the compiler. It always tries to parse the -I itself and bails out with:

[foobar]$ nelua --cflags '-I./clibs' main.nelua 
error: unknown option '-I'
Did you mean one of these: '-A' '-B' '-C' '-D' '-H' '-L' '-M' '-P' '-S' '-T' '-V' '-Y' '-a' '-b' '-c' '-d' '-g' '-h' '-i' '-j' '-o' '-q' '-r' '-s' '-t' '-v' '-w'?

What is the recommended way of adding local C files to a project?

[edubart]

What is the recommended way of adding local C files to a project?

## cinclude 'argtable3.c' should be enough to include a C source file implementation into a Nelua source file, as long they are both in the same directory, but looks like that is already available there, double check if that line exists and is being executed in your argtable3.nelua bindings.

Maybe you wanted to add argtable3 folder to the Nelua modules search path, and using -L is correct for that.

In short if you have all 4 files argtable3.h, argtable3.c, argtable3.nelua, test-argtable3.nelua in the same folder, and your run nelua test-argtable3.nelua from the same folder, you should be able to run without issues. If you create and execute test-argtable3.nelua in a different folder, then using -L should be enough to expose argtable3.nelua and its local dependencies (.h and .c files).

[acisternino]

Hi Eduardo

Yes, as long as files are all in the same directory (like in the nelua-decl project) things works ok.

My questions were more about what to do in a real project where I want to organize files, modules and libs in different folders.

My original idea was to have this structure:

.
├── main.nelua
├── argparse.nelua        <-- unmodified binding file
└── clibs/
    ├── argparse3.c
    └── argparse3.h

And this is what didn't work using the --cflags option.

I have also tried these two approaches that both worked using -L:

.
├── main.nelua
└── argparse/             <-- directory named as the module
    ├── init.nelua        <-- this is the binding file renamed
    ├── argparse3.c
    └── argparse3.h

and

.
├── main.nelua
└── mods/
    ├── argparse.nelua
    ├── argparse3.c
    └── argparse3.h

[edubart]

In that case, use the following:

nelua --cflags='-I./clibs' main.nelua 

This should fix the command line error you were getting, notice the = added.

[acisternino]

It worked like a charm.

Thanks a lot!