Binding C to Crystal: preprocessor directives

Question

I'm working with the crt.cr Crystal shard, which binds ncurses. It's lacking some things I want, like mvhline(). So I'm adding the things I want.

One thing I want is is ncurses alternative character sheet, so I can make nice boxes.

As far as I can tell, this is pretty dang hard (but I'm not an expert in either Crystal or C). From what I can tell, the alternative character sheet characters are all unsigned chars, defined by the preprocessor.

Can someone explain how I can get access to the alternative character sheet characters?

This sounds a bit too broad for the site - but awesome for the [developers list](https://crystal-lang.org/community) — mgarciaisaia, Apr 27 '17 at 00:37
Sorry - I mean the question seems to be offtipic for the site, for being too broad, but you could get some help asking at Crystal's mailing list — mgarciaisaia, Apr 27 '17 at 00:41

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 29 '17 at 08:14

4

You cannot access things that are only in C header files (and things that are done through the preprocessor) in a shared library file, because they simply aren't put there.

Since Crystal only binds to a shared library file, there is no option other than manually (sometimes automatically) duplicating these as constants in Crystal code.

answered Apr 29 '17 at 08:14

Oleh Prypin

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Yep, that's what I did. – Jones Apr 29 '17 at 13:22

Binding C to Crystal: preprocessor directives

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