Bounty for -minimal compiler flag

[Paulo Pinto]

Am 16.02.2014 17:18, schrieb Elie Morisse:
> On Thursday, 13 February 2014 at 23:14:20 UTC, 1100110 wrote:
>> I think it's about time I gave back to this wonderful community.
>>
>> I'm offering a $50 bounty on this.
>> (Preferably Bitcoins, but I'll use bountysource if desired.)
>>
>> rules:
>> Has to be called -minimal
>> Has to fulfill Walter's original post. (listed below)
>> Has to split the separate parts into different flags as well as
>> -minimal(-nogc, -nomoduleinfo, etc. Naming is left to the implementer).
>>
>>
>> This seems to be a good idea and has lots of support from the
>> community, would anyone like to chip in a few more bucks?
>>
>> I haven't set the bounty yet, depends on if multiple people chip in.
>> I'll probably set it sometime tonight.
>>
>> Let me know what y'all think, am I leaving anything out?
>> Thanks
>>
>>
>> On Tuesday, 11 February 2014 at 19:43:00 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>>> I've toyed with this idea for a while, and wondered what the interest
>>> there is in something like this.
>>>
>>> The idea is to be able to use a subset of D that does not require any
>>> of druntime or phobos - it can be linked merely with the C standard
>>> library. To that end, there'd be a compiler switch (-betterC) which
>>> would enforce the subset.
>>>
>>> (First off, I hate the name "better C", any suggestions?)
>>>
>>> The subset would disallow use of any features that rely on:
>>>
>>> 1. moduleinfo
>>> 2. exception handling
>>> 3. gc
>>> 4. Object
>>>
>>> I've used such a subset before when bringing D up on a new platform,
>>> as the new platform didn't have a working phobos.
>>>
>>> What do you think?
>
> Isn't this a bit premature?
>
> The idea is controversial, if you read the thread Andrei and Walter
> wanted to postpone it:
>
>> I convinced Walter of my view on this, so he won't work on it. I trust
> that at least between the two of us we can focus on working on what
> matters most first.
>>
>> Andrei
>
> so why the hurry?
>
>
> std.allocator should solve the biggest issue which is not making the GC
> mandatory, and then I don't see the point of stripping D of many of its
> essential features (classes, array operations, TLS, dynamic casts,
> static ctors and dtors, ...) when GDC and LDC are already able to enable
> them (i.e add parts of druntime and Phobos to the binary) on a
> per-needed basis when statically linking.
>
> IMHO an approach that would not involve making a binary choice between
> "full D" and "minimal D" is to add an option to make the linker strip
> druntime and Phobos' shared libraries (or any shared library, and it's
> not specific to D btw) to the "lowest common denominator" required by a
> bunch of libraries and applications. Wouldn't that fulfill one of the
> two goals -nodruntime is trying to achieve as far as I understand
> (saving memory)?
>
> And regarding the other goal, to help porting D to other platforms a
> stub druntime would be cleaner than a hackish compiler flag that
> requires many changes to DMD.

That is also my opinion.