Thoughts about D

[Michael V. Franklin]

On Sunday, 3 December 2017 at 12:20:14 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> It may indeed work to use a special druntime. My expectation, 
> however, is that it's a lot more work trying to develop and 
> support another runtime library, and a lot more work for the 
> user trying to get that library worked into his build system. 
> This will drastically cut down on the number of users willing 
> to give it a try.

I don't think it's necessary for you or anyone else to create a 
special officially supported runtime.  What I need is a way to 
create a very minimal runtime that supports just the features of 
D that I'm opting in to, without having to write phony stubs and 
boiler plate that, in the end, is just going to be discarded by 
the linker.

Currently the compiler expects things to exist in the runtime 
that have no hope of ever being used, just to get a build.  In 
fact, one can compile against the stock object.d to satisfy the 
compiler, but then omit linking to druntime, and still get a 
proper binary.  I had to stop pursuing it because I couldn't 
suggest it professionally and expect to be taken seriously.

> Meanwhile, we've got -betterC today, and it's simple and it 
> works.

IMO -betterC is papering over the problem rather than dealing 
with it.

Mike