A special treat

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Tue, 09 Feb 2010 10:53:47 -0500, Steve Teale  
<steve.teale at britseyeview.com> wrote:

> When D2 is 'frozen', as a special treat would it be possible for it to be
> able to generate object files that could be converted into shared
> libraries, and for Phobos to be a shared library to support same.
>
> I have tried every which way I can think of to create shared libraries
> using D. The closest I have come is with the old 1.030 GDC, and even with
> that there are problems. I've tried to describe the current situation in
> some detail on the blog section of my <a href="http://
> www.britseyeview.com/GDC-newbie.html">GDC-newbie page</a>. It is too long
> to post on the newsgroup.
>
> The inability to do this is a real show-stopper for D on Linux, and
> unless things have got better since I last tried, the same can be said
> for Windows DLLs.
>
> Please!

Many (including myself) have expressed the real requirement for shared  
libraries.  Sometimes the response is "oh who needs shared libraries  
anyways, there is so much memory in todays computers" and the other  
response is that "Windows DLLs suck, so we can't do it".

I agree it needs to be figured out before D is considered a viable  
professional language.  I don't think it's impossible, but someone just  
needs to spend the time.

Another new problem to pile on to Windows DLLs is the new requirement for  
default thread local storage.  See this bug that is very unlikely to get  
fixed (by Microsoft):

http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=3342

So the tradeoff is, either use crappy TLS (using a function to look up  
global variables) or only support Windows Vista and later.  If Windows 7  
hadn't come out, I'd say requiring Vista is about as bad as not having  
DLLs :)

-Steve