Three Unlikely Successful Features of D

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Adam D. Ruppe" <destructionator at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:vuegxcpcbsefvmjdqesp at forum.dlang.org...
> On Wednesday, 21 March 2012 at 21:01:10 UTC, Kapps wrote:
>> On the topic of import, mixin imports are something that I believe will 
>> eventually become a great deal more popular than they are today.
>
> I use a *lot* of import() (one of my work projects imports()
> about 140 files!) but I fairly rarely use mixin with it.
>
> What I love about it is simply having a one-piece
> executable. All your default data is right there. Deployment
> is easy. If replacement files exist at runtime, you might
> use them, but if not, you always have a default built in!
>
>
> It is much easier than external resource files, and being
> able to process is a nice win.

Yea. It especially would have been great back when I was doing GBA homebrew. 
With that stuff having been in C/C++, just to include *any* real binary 
data, we had to use external tools (as a pre-compilation build step) to 
convert the binary data files into C files that contained "char myData[] = 
[0x01, 0x5B, 0xFF, 0x80, ...];" (or something like that - my C muscles have 
atrophied). And then later on someone made sort of a mini file-system where 
you could add data to a ROM image and then query/access it from your code in 
the ROM.

If we had been doing things in D, we could all have just typed 
import("myData.dat") and been *done*. None of those extra tools or 
MIME-like-bloating^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hencoding bullshit.