DMD producing huge binaries

[ZombineDev via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 20 May 2016 at 11:40:12 UTC, Rene Zwanenburg wrote:
> On Friday, 20 May 2016 at 11:32:16 UTC, ZombineDev wrote:
>> IMO, the best way forward is:
>> + The compiler should lower voldemort types, according to the 
>> scheme that Steve suggested 
>> (http://forum.dlang.org/post/nhkmo7$ob5$1@digitalmars.com)
>> + After that, during symbol generation (mangling) if a symbol 
>> starts getting larger than some threshold (e.g. 800 
>> characters), the mangling algorithm should detect that and 
>> bail out by generating some unique id instead. The only 
>> valuable information that the symbol must include is the 
>> module name and location (line and column number) of the 
>> template instantiation.
>
> Location info shouldn't be used. This will break things like 
> interface files and dynamic libraries.

Well... template-heavy code doesn't play well header-files and 
dynamic libraries. Most of the time templates are used for the 
implementation of an interface, but template types such as ranges 
are unsuable in function signatures. That's why they're called 
voldemort types - because they're the ones that can not/must not 
be named.
Instead dynamic libraries should use stable types such as 
interfaces, arrays and function pointers, which don't have the 
aforementioned symbol size problems.

Since we're using random numbers for symbols (instead of the 
actual names) it would not be possible for such symbols to be 
part of an interface, because a different invocation of the 
compiler would produce different symbol names. Such symbols 
should always an implementation detail, and not part of an 
interface. That's why location info would play no role, except 
for debugging purposes.