DIP11: Automatic downloading of libraries

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Sat, 18 Jun 2011 23:33:29 -0400, Daniel Murphy  
<yebblies at nospamgmail.com> wrote:

> "Jacob Carlborg" <doob at me.com> wrote in message
> news:iti35g$2r4r$2 at digitalmars.com...
>>
>> 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?
>>
>
> Yeah, it won't be possible to do it all in D until we have .so's working  
> on
> linux etc, which I think is a while off yet.  Although this could be  
> worked
> around by writing a small loader in c++ and using another process  
> (written
> in D) to do the actual work.  Maybe it would be easier to build dmd as a
> shared lib (or a static lib) and just provide a different front...
>
> My point is that the compiler can quite easily be modified to allow it to
> pass pretty much anything (missing imports, pragma(lib), etc) to a build
> tool, and it should be fairly straightforward for the build tool to pass
> things back in (adding objects to the linker etc).  This could allow  
> single
> pass full compilation even when the libraries need to be fetched off the
> internet.  It could also allow seperate compilation of several source  
> files
> at once, without having to re-do parsing+semantic each time.  Can dmd
> currently do this?
> Most importantly it keeps knowledge about urls and downloading files  
> outside
> the compiler, where IMO it does not belong.

Note the current proposal does exactly what you are looking for, but does  
it via processes and command line instead of dlls.  This opens up numerous  
avenues of implementation (including re-using already existing utilities),  
plus keeps it actually separated (i.e. a dll/so can easily corrupt the  
memory of the application, whereas a separate process cannot).

-Steve