CTFE and DI: The Crossroads of D

[Artur Skawina]

On 05/10/12 00:15, Adam Wilson wrote:
> On Wed, 09 May 2012 15:07:44 -0700, Adam D. Ruppe <destructionator at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> On Wednesday, 9 May 2012 at 20:41:05 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote:
>>> Except that there is a distinct need for the DRuntime as a shared library.
>>
>> That doesn't really matter - you can deploy as a shared library
>> and still use full source as the interface file.
>>
>> Hell, that's what putting implementations in the .di file
>> does anyway!
> 
> Sure, but a lot of software developers, particularly those with money, don't want their source getting out, and in a lot of cases, there is no good reason to distribute the source. There are also a bunch of cases where you don't even want something to be CTFEable like Walter's example on a different thread of the GC. Why would ever want to CTFE the GC?
> 
> Until D starts to see some serious usage in business, it's never going to get out of "toy"/"hobby" language status in the eyes of the developer community at large. Few businesses want to release their source. DI's as a complete source file are a non-starter to that large segment of the development world. Improving DI generation is just taking down another barrier to D usage by that group of people.
> 

A "group of people" that wants to distribute binary closed-source libs, yet finds
having to manually specify the API of their library to be a barrier?

If having to write all the required declarations from scratch (instead of using
some *.d -> *.di converter) is a real problem, then, umm, it's most likely not
their biggest one...

artur