The DeRailed Challenge

[Gregor Richards]

kris wrote:
> 'DeRailed' is a project intended to compete in the space where RoR has 
> been successful. We believe an RoR "killer" will do wonders for D as a 
> language, in terms of publicity and potential widespread adoption.
> 
> To get there we need to surmount some hurdles. This is simply an 
> overview, not a detailed analysis:
> 
> 1) D is a statically compiled language; it doesn't have the late-binding 
> support of a language like Ruby or Python. We need to find a way of 
> enabling late-binding of code & symbols, in a manner that is seamless to 
> a user/developer. DDL is a project targeted at exactly this issue, but 
> it's a thorny problem to address. Some help from the compiler itself 
> would go a long way to making this a reality (on linux, this currently 
> appears to be resolvable).

DDL where the OS doesn't have decent shared libraries, shared libraries 
otherwise. Note that the only OS that D runs on that doesn't have decent 
shared libraries is Windows. DLLs are awful. .so files can be loaded at 
runtime with dlopen, have no GC problems, no exception problems, no 
typeinfo problems ... they're basically superior in every way.

> 
> 2) Full reflection at run time is something D lacks. We need this to 
> properly enable late-binding to the extent we feel is needed. There's a 
> side-project under way right now to address this particular issue.

For the interested, 
http://svn.dsource.org/projects/tango.tools/trunk/tools/rodin/

> 
> 3) a GUI front end, capable of being generated on the fly, yet 
> sufficiently powerful and extensible. We've been investigating various 
> existing technologies and approaches.

Perhaps Glade's XML support could be built into duit?

> 
> <SNIP>

  - Gregor Richards