D interpreter

Bruce Adams tortoise_74 at yeah.who.co.uk
Wed Oct 24 17:48:37 PDT 2007


Bruce Adams Wrote:

> Gregor Richards Wrote:
> 
> > Bruce Adams wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > >    Seeing the link:
> > > 
> > > http://www.d-programming-language.org/ 
> > > 
> > > posted in another thread reminded me that DMD sports a nifty D interpreter. Something I always wanted for C++ incidentally. With all the talk on virtual machines recently I was wondering how the D interpreter works. 
> > > 
> > > Does it compile and run?  or use the embedded interpreter used for compile time evaluation? are these one and the same?
> > > 
> > > What happens with imports? Are they interpreted or compiled on the fly or required to exist already?
> > > 
> > > I know I should really try the experiment and find some of this out for myself.
> > > 
> > > How hard would it be to duplicate this behaviour in the gdc front end?
> > > 
> > 
> > The -run flag of DMD is anything but an interpreter. It's just a quick 
> > way to run the binary after you've compiled it. It has all the same 
> > semantics as compiling software with DMD directly, including all the fun 
> > of imports. 
> 
> Ah I was hoping for D doubling as a dynamic language. Oh well.
> 

Actually the only thing missing to make this work is a cleverer import.
One which could trigger compilation either when read or with more complexity "just in time". This feature might also make build management simpler. It would be a cool blurring of the line between a compiled and an interpreted language but no doubt you'll all reply telling me what a sick puppy I am and why. :)

Regards,

Bruce.


Just let me at that front end and I'll have some fun hacking it in to a pseudo-interpreter  - muhaha.



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