newbie confusion with arrays and structs

[Jesse Phillips]

On Thursday, 26 January 2012 at 22:10:23 UTC, Justin Whear wrote:
> If you want your Array code to be a separate library/project, 
> you can compile it like so:
> dmd Array.d -lib
>
> Then when you compile your other project:
> dmd prd.d -I/location/of/Array.d -L/location/of/Array.so
>
> Justin

It is actually a little more than that.

dmd array.d -lib -oflibarray.a

dmd does no currently generate shared libraries, so .a (archive) 
is used.

dmd prd.d -I. -L-L. -L-larray

-I (Include directory, used by compiler for locating "header" 
files. These are used by the compiler to verify the calls you are 
making into the library, and to generate code from templates if 
those are being used)

-L-L (Pass to the linker the flag -L. The ld linker flag -L is 
for the library search path)

-L-l (Pass the linker the flag -l. The ld linker flag -l request 
that a library be linked)

Libraries are named starting with lib by Unix convention. When 
passing the library name this is left off (-lm load libm.so or 
libm.a). I believe you can leave it on though (-llibm) but am not 
sure.

The reason DMD does not compile imported libraries is because of 
two reasons. When the magic stops working you still have to deal 
with and understand these steps. The compiler is busy with its 
job of converting code, it should be helping other tools to make 
its job simple ("Compiler as a Service"). You will find rdmd is 
distributed with dmd:

rdmd prd.d