D as A Better C?

[Mike]

On Tuesday, 11 February 2014 at 20:42:26 UTC, bearophile wrote:
> Walter Bright:
>
>> (First off, I hate the name "better C", any suggestions?)
>
> A different name is needed.

I don't think a different name is needed, nor do I think it would 
be a good idea.  All that's needed are a few compiler switches to 
enable/disable features so D can be used on more platforms.  GNU 
g++ does this without giving it a new name (e.g. -fno-exceptions, 
-fno-rtti, etc...)  D can do the same without giving it a new 
name.

>
>
>> What do you think?
>
> It must produce very small binaries.
>
> If you import anything from Phobos it will not work in most 
> cases, even if the feature you are importing does not require 
> GC, druntime, etc, because in most cases other parts of the 
> Phobos module use them. Is this going to cause a fragmentation 
> of Phobos?
>
> What to do with dynamic array literals? In many cases they 
> allocate. A partial solution is to use the [...]s syntax for 
> fixed size array literals.
>
> Constant associative arrays at global scope don't need the GC, 
> but they need the druntime, so I guess they too need to be 
> disallowed.
>
> Bye,
> bearophile

I don't consider Phobos part of thE D language, just part of the 
D ecosystem.  If one disables features on which phobos depends, 
and phobos doesn't work, that's what they deserve.

In time, however, phobos could be ported to more limited systems 
that don't have certain D features, but that's such a long term 
goal right now.  I wouldn't even worry about it until the runtime 
is brought to those platforms first.

Mike