A modest proposal: eliminate template code bloat

[H. S. Teoh]

On Sun, Apr 08, 2012 at 10:56:43PM +0400, Dmitry Olshansky wrote:
> On 08.04.2012 22:51, Walter Bright wrote:
[...]
> >The main difficulty is not being able to modify the linker. So you're
> >pretty much limited to what the compiler is able to do before
> >linking. D does allow the compiler to deal with all the modules at
> >compile time, so this helps a lot.
> 
> I'm thinking what if we kind of do it as an extension so that your
> linker (e.g. optlink) knows about these checksums (or whatever you use
> instead) while normal linker just works the way it always did.
[...]

I agree. Either that, or have an external utility for doing it.

I must say that IMO current linker technology is quite dumb, and no harm
could come from experimenting with smarter linkers.  Things like
duplicate template instantiation elimination have been introduced due to
the influence of C++; I don't see why D shouldn't introduce its own
advancements to linkers too. :-)


T

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