Dynamic Library Support for D

[ponce]

On Thursday, 2 January 2014 at 18:22:46 UTC, Jeroen Bollen wrote:
> Currently D has a very poor support for creating and loading 
> dynamic libraries. It requires a bunch of code while other 
> languages like C just allow you to create it as you would 
> create a static library.
>
> A problem here seems to be that D wants to integrate as much as 
> possible with other languages, resulting in very poor support 
> for integrating with it's own language.
>
> I understand that the problem here is that the libraries get 
> saved as .so or .dll, which should also linkable with other, 
> non-D, applications, meaning the runtime cannot initialize on 
> it's own.
>
> Why isn't there a D-specific format for dynamic libraries, that 
> just shares the garbage collector with the main application, 
> and thus only allow you to link it with D programs, and that 
> way make it way easier to write a dynamic library in D.
>
> I guess the only reason this doesn't exist is because it'll 
> take a lot of work?

There is one such format, it's called DDL 
(http://dsource.org/projects/ddl) and it dates back from the 
ancient D1 civilization.
It just seems nobody has ported it to D2 yet.