Proposal for custom time string formatting in std.datetime

[Walter Bright]

On 12/22/2011 12:14 AM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Thursday, December 22, 2011 00:05:58 Walter Bright wrote:
>> We must deal with our imperfect tools as they are. For example, I am not
>> going to rewrite the Linux ld linker, and the OSX linker, and the FreeBSD
>> linker, etc.
>
> If the compiler and/or linker don't strip unused symbols, then how on earth is
> importing the module _not_ going to pull in everything in it save for
> uninitialized templates?

There are data that needs to be there, but is never symbolically referenced, for 
example, the exception handler tables. The compiler does the best it can, like 
emitting one object file per function, but it always must behave conservatively.

The elf object file format isn't going to change, we aren't going to rewrite the 
gnu linker, nor will we rewrite the back ends of gcc and lcc.

There isn't any one simple rule to avoid unnecessary bloat, the only way is to 
get somewhat familiar with how things work. For example, using 'class' as a 
namespace generates a useless vtbl[] and a typeinfo instance, and in the future 
will generate useless reflection data. It's better to use a module as a 
namespace, as that is what it is designed for.

The most important thing is to design the boxes around the various units of 
functionality such that there are minimal lines between those boxes. For 
example, if I want to see if one file is newer than another (like for a make 
program), it should not pull in timezone processing or date formatting code.