Release D 2.078.0

[David Nadlinger]

On Thursday, 4 January 2018 at 13:03:21 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
> https://dlang.org/blog/2018/01/04/dmd-2-078-0-has-been-released/

> In normal D code, struct destructors are executed when an 
> instance goes out of scope. This is handled by DRuntime, […]

This is slightly inaccurate. Regular stack cleanup doesn't 
involve the runtime at all; druntime only comes into play for 
exception handling. Since destructors also need to be run when 
the scope is left by an exception, they are implemented via `try 
{} finally {}` internally. The EH part of these depends on 
druntime, but not the regular path.

> One of the seemingly obscure features dependent upon DRuntime 
> is the ModuleInfo type. It’s a type that works quietly behind 
> the scenes as one of the enabling mechanisms of reflection and 
> most D programmers will likely never hear of it.

This is somewhat confusingly worded as well. It's actually mostly 
the other way around – druntime depends on ModuleInfo to be 
emitted, crucially for static constructor, destructors and unit 
tests to be run. At least without shared libraries in the 
picture, it would be fairly easy to manually look up the set of 
ModuleInfos in a druntime-less D program.

  — David