Article first draft: The Joy and Gibbering Terror of Custom-Loading Executables

[Bastiaan Veelo]

Amazing.

I am not a native English speaker, but "here me out" should probably be 
"hear me out". And later, have a look at "It would've been easier for me 
to have done it than to written about it".

Cheers,
Bastiaan.


Burton Radons wrote:
> I've made a first draft of an article on custom-loading executables, which can be used for dynamic compilation, alternative (and potentially portable) plugin structures to DLLs, scripting-style eval, and turning a compiler or most any other program into a library.
> 
> There are four separate formats of the document but here's the HTML which branches everywhere:
> http://members.shaw.ca/burton-radons/The%20Joy%20and%20Gibbering%20Terror%20of%20Custom-Loading%20Executables.html
> 
> Or if that breaks your newsreader:
> http://tinyurl.com/22a6x7
> 
> A decent library for Phobos is included (http://members.shaw.ca/burton-radons/exelib.zip). It has actual (lean but complete) documentation under docs/index.html; I'd particularly check out exe.dynamism's RuntimeTemplate, which is suggestive of what this kind of thing can do to coding.
> 
> The background is that I've been doing this off and on for eight years now (starting with a library called Stonewheel for DJGPP, resurrected briefly with a truly incomprehensible announcement in 2002 for D) and I recently sent an e-mail to Walter saying that I'd implemented the scripting-language function "eval" and found it to only take 20 ms per call with DMD, and I rambled about the fine points of doing this kind of tomfoolery. By the time I said I'd loaded DMD manually and it was now taking 1 ms per call, he told me to make an article of it which I was planning to anyway.
> 
> As a draft and as someone who's always been a lousy teacher, I'd like input on anything that seems confusing or you'd like expanded upon or even whole new sections you feel deserve coverage, like the D side of runtime templating. I know I race through the process of loading and linking, but the poor teacher part comes into play - I have no idea how to think like someone who doesn't know what I know. Toodles!