DIP11: Automatic downloading of libraries

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 2011-06-18 08:09, Daniel Murphy wrote:
> One option that I see is to create a compiler plugin interface that lets a
> build tool/package manager hook the compiler's import resolution process.
>
> A very (very) basic implementation: (windows only)
> https://github.com/yebblies/dmd/tree/importresolve
>
> For those who don't want to read the source code:
> The user (or the build tool, or in sc.ini/dmd.conf) supplies a dll/so on the
> command line with:
> dmd -ih=mylib.dll
> Which exports a single function "_importhandler" that is called when a file
> is not found on the include path.  It passes the module name and the
> contents of the describing pragma, if any.
> eg.
> pragma(libver, "collection", "version", "hash")
> import xpackage.xmodule;
>
> calls
> filename = importhandler("xpackage.xmodule", "collection", "version",
> "hash")
>
> and lets the library download, update etc, and return the full filename of
> the required library.

That seems cool. But, you would want to write the pluing in D and that's 
not possible yet on all platforms? Or should everything be done with 
extern(C), does that work?

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg