`headers` beside `link`, read the same way: a path, any clang flags that header
needs, ${NAME} expanded from the environment. What comes back is ordinary
declare-c declarations, generated before the package's names are qualified, so
they arrive as rl/… exactly like the hand-written ones and nothing downstream
can tell which is which. No new form, no new decl_kind, no reader or parser
change.
A leading `?` makes a line optional. vendor/raylib uses it, because "a build
needs libraylib linkable and not raylib-devel installed" is a property worth
keeping — requiring a header would take it from everyone to give the check to
whoever has one. Unset FLAN_RAYLIB_H and the build is exactly what it was; set
it and every signature is checked against raylib's own header.
A C symbol the package already binds by hand is left alone, so declare-c
remains the escape hatch and stays the thing that wins. A refused function
becomes a hidden name through Load.refuse_hidden, so writing rl/get-gamepad-name
says "GetGamepadName returns char *, and a string only crosses as a parameter"
rather than "unknown name".
Measured, because the cost is the whole argument for how much to import:
release build +14ms cold, +4ms warm — Reach prunes the wrappers
redefinition 31ms -> 46.5ms
dev build +333ms cold — dev does not prune, 428 wrappers
Reach.link already drops a generated wrapper whose declaration nothing
reachable calls, and that is what makes a wholesale import cost nothing in a
release build. It does not prune dev builds, on purpose, so a dev build
compiles every wrapper once at session start; Build.shared compiles no C, so
redefinition does not pay that again.
Reading the header is cached — 64ms of a 72ms check, against 8ms for the whole
program without it. Keyed like the object cache, on everything that could
change the answer: the header's path, size and mtime, the full flag list, and a
format version, since the cached value is a marshalled dump. The extracted
signatures are cached rather than clang's JSON, because the parse is half the
cost. That takes the delta to 17ms.
Verified end to end and headless, using only imported declarations:
ColorToInt of {17,34,51,68} is 0x11223344 and ColorTint hands the four bytes
back separately, so field order is pinned by arithmetic rather than by a
round trip. TextLength of "hello" is 5, so the string crossing works.
declare-c generates the wrapper, the typedefs and the prototype from one
declaration, so they cannot disagree with each other. What nothing checked was
whether the declaration matched the library — BUILT.md records that as trusted
rather than guaranteed, because no header was ever read.
This reads one. clang is asked for a JSON AST dump of the header and shelled
out to, not linked: -Xclang -ast-dump=json is the same binary on PATH that
every build already runs, which is plan.org's "Why LLVM IR as text" applied a
second time. Zig's old @cImport linked clang as a library and that is precisely
the dependency plan.org rejected.
cjson.ml is enough JSON to read the dump and no more, so this adds no opam
package to parse it.
What comes out of the header is signatures and nothing else — not structs, not
enums, not macros. The bound on how much is imported is the package's own
defstructs: a function whose signature mentions a struct the package has not
described is refused with that reason, so vendor/raylib describing thirteen
structs is what makes the import thirteen structs wide. Keeping the layouts
hand-written is also what makes checking them against the header's records
worth doing — a _Static_assert was rejected in BUILT.md as circular, and this
is not, because the two sides have different authors.
Refusals are demotions, taken from Zig's translator: it never drops a
declaration it cannot handle, it binds the name to a @compileError carrying the
reason so the failure lands at the use site. Load.refuse_hidden is already that
mechanism. So a returned char * does not kill the header — it makes one name
unavailable, with the reason attached.
flan import-c prints what it would produce, what it refused, how the package's
defstructs compare with the header's records, and how the hand-written
declare-c lines compare with the header's signatures.
Against raylib 5.5, the version whose .so vendor/raylib/link names: all 16
defstructs and all 172 hand-written declare-c agree exactly. Against the 5.1-dev
header installed in /usr/local it reports ten differences, nine functions that
version does not have and one that gained a parameter — so the check has teeth
and the clean run is not a vacuous one.
