The D ecosystem in Debian with free-as-in-freedom DMD

[Matthias Klumpp via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 10 April 2017 at 12:40:33 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev 
wrote:
> [...]
> Can we treat it more like an interpreted language instead?

An interpreted language would interpret the code on the target 
system at runtime. This is not what D does, so we can't really 
treat it like we treat Python (where it is possible no neatly 
separate Python modules into separate packages - transitions 
triggering rebuild cascades only exist when we jump to the next 
major CPython version, which is something distributions are well 
prepared for. Transitions are only an issue if they happen 
constantly).
At time, D is treated like C++, since it has much of the same 
challenges and we know how to deal with C++ - additionally to 
C++, D unfortunately though also has the unique issues outlined 
above, which complicate things.

I also want to stress that having a single C++ library like Boost 
compiled into stuff and rolling dependency transitions when its 
API/ABI changes with a major release is less of a problem than 
having the entire language give zero stability and 
interoperability guarantees on anything that is compiled with it.