I like playing with the D programming language and I wrote this little post to show how it’s easy to create a dynamic library (shared object, .so) that can be invoked in other programs; to have a little fun we will write a D replacement for the rand() C standard library function call. For your convenience, all the code is also on github

Let’s start with the demo implementation, a C program that calls 10 times the stdlib function rand() to get a random number.

// random_num.c
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <time.h>
 
int main(){
  srand(time(NULL));
  int i = 10;
  while(i--) printf("%d\n",rand()%100);
  return 0;
}

if we compile and run this program, we get something like this:

$ gcc -O3 -ansi -pedantic -std=c99 -Wall -O2 random_num.c -o random_num
$ ./random_num 
79
51
80
49
24
63
95
85
96
97

Now we will play a little and leverage LD_PRELOAD to give our program an ‘alternate’ version of rand() ; this new one will be written in D:

//file: mylib.d
module mylib;

import std.conv;
import std.file : readText;
import std.string : chomp;

export extern(C) int rand() {
      return readText("random.txt").chomp.to!int;
}

as you can see, after the imports we declare a rand() function with C linkage; this function doesn’t accept any parameter but needs to return an integer. So we can use advanced phobos functions in the powerful D standard library, together with an easy to read UFCS syntax to read a number from a text file, remove extra whitespaces and convert to an integer. As a result, any program that uses the rand() function will get the number stored in the text file. Easier than Python, native as C.

Let’s try:

$ echo 42 > random.txt
$ dmd -m64 -fPIC -w -O -shared -of=mylib.so mylib.d
$ LD_PRELOAD=./mylib.so ./random_num 
42
42
42
42
42
42
42
42
42
42

As a bonus, I leave here the GNUMakefile used for compilation and test of both programs; I prefer GNU Make format because it doesn’t rely on explicit “TAB” characters so it’s easier to copy and paste.

#file: GNUMakefile
.RECIPEPREFIX +=

.PHONY: all

CFLAGS = -ansi -pedantic -std=c99 -Wall -O2
DFLAGS = -m64 -fPIC -w -O -shared

all: random_num mylib.so

random_num: random_num.c
  gcc -O3 $(CFLAGS) $< -o $@

%.so:%.d
  dmd $(DFLAGS) -of=$@ $<

clean:
  rm -f *.so *.o random_num

real_random: all
  ./random_num

fake_random: all
  LD_PRELOAD=./mylib.so ./random_num