DMD 1.022 and 2.005 releases - plugins for compiler

[Aarti_pl]

Walter Bright pisze:
> Aarti_pl wrote:
>> I just wonder if it wouldn't be better to allow external plugins for 
>> DMD. This way you could just create different plugins to allow 
>> different name mangling and different interpretation of data in 
>> extern() sections...
>>
>> We could have then different plugins written by external vendors eg:
>> CPP_GCC
>> CPP_MSVC
>> Pascal
>> etc.
>>
>> Walter, did you think about solution like this?
> 
> No.
> 
>> Is there possibility to implement this?
> 
> I think the number of different calling conventions in use is pretty 
> limited, so the benefit may not be there.

Real advantage would be that someone (some company?) could implement 
everything necessary to easily link D with C++ (you wrote that it needs 
10 man-years, so I prefer you won't do it :D ).

Also it would allow to prepare plugins for other languages, without 
bloating D compiler itself.

Maybe it would be even commercial C++ plugin. But I guess that for 
companies which want to start working with D and connect new D code with 
old C++ code, price will be no-issue.

It is possible that also some other functionality of compiler could be 
delegated to plugins, but currently I have in mind only this extern() 
thing...

BR
Marcin Kuszczak
(Aarti_pl)