Compilation strategy

[Walter Bright]

On 12/16/2012 11:00 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> Of course, that provide zero theoretical security, because anyone who's
> desperate enough to reverse-engineer your library will do it even if
> they only have the final executable. But the casual onlooker factor is
> not to be dismissed when dealing with management types. So I contend
> that precompiling to some kind of IR is of some practical value, even if
> in theory it's not worth very much. (Yes decompilers and what-not will
> always be there. That didn't stop Java developers from preferentially
> shipping .class files vs. .java files. You can't stop the professionals,
> but you can at least stop the petty thieves. This can be important to
> some people.)


I don't care if some people delude themselves about the "security" of a binary 
version of the IR, but there's no way I'll represent D as offering such 
security. It's fraudulent to even pretend that such would.

.class files offer ZERO security. You can get a free tool off the internet to 
decompile them at the push of a button.

There are no tools to do that with object files.

There are legitimate arguments for a binary file. Obscurity is NOT one of them, 
and cannot be.