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

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, April 10, 2017 23:08:17 David Nadlinger via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> IIRC OCaml is also very much a statically linked affair. And how
> does Debian distribute Go binaries? Is there any issue with those
> being linked statically? If not, let's just distribute D
> libraries as source and compile/link them statically when
> building binaries, and problem solved.

Honestly, I don't see how it really makes much sense to use shared libraries
with D except in cases where you have no choice. The lack of ABI
compatibility makes them almost useless.

Also, what are we even looking to distribute in debian? I would have thought
that the normal thing to do would be to build with dub, in which case,
having the compiler and dub be debian packages makes sense but not really
anything else. If you're looking to package an application that was written
in D, then that becomes another question, but then if you just statically
link it, the ABI compatibility problem goes away as does any need to package
any D library dependencies.

- Jonathan M Davis