dub: how to reference a compiled package

[Chris Wright via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Fri, 26 Feb 2016 03:19:26 +0000, mahdi wrote:

> Great! Thanks.
> 
> I was looking for a feature like `jar` files in Java or `assemblies` in
> C# where all compiled code and metadata/symbols are stored together
> inside a single binary file.

C# and Java provide their own linkers and specify their own object 
formats. One aspect of that was including enough metadata to reconstruct 
the source code from the binary in a convenient and performant manner.

DMD could store an extra symbol in each file it output including the 
autogenerated .di file for each source file. However, that would require 
the frontend to be able to parse arbitrary library and object formats.

It's much easier to solve this in an external tool like Dub.