Thoughts about D

[Walter Bright]

On 11/27/2017 10:24 PM, Dmitry Olshansky wrote:
> On Tuesday, 28 November 2017 at 06:12:19 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> On 11/27/2017 9:11 PM, rikki cattermole wrote:
>>> On 28/11/2017 5:03 AM, Walter Bright wrote:
>>>> On 11/27/2017 6:55 PM, John wrote:
>>>>> Should add optlink to that list, would love to see it converted to D!
>>>>
>>> We have discussed this on Discord a little bit lately.
>>> What we are hoping for is a D dmc+libc updated to use dmd-be. Potentially 
>>> allowing us to use LLVM's linker but with dmc's libc as well. Giving us out 
>>> of the box experience for 64bit.
>>>
>>> It would be nice, but well, your site would need a lot of changes to go in 
>>> this direction.
>>
>> Yes, I've thought about making dmc++ 64 bit, but there'd be a fair amount of 
>> work (mostly upgrading SNN to 64 bits.)
> 
> We could also convert that libc to D ;)
> Seriously betterC mode would make that way easier and more fun, is it on GitHub?

Yes, and I should finish boost licensing it!

It's written in old-fashioned C code, and a fair bit of assembler. Every line of 
it would have to be reviewed for 64 bit portability, and there's no test suite :-(

The good news is it has been pretty darned reliable.

There's also the STL library, which is pretty complex.


> Actually Herb Sutter shared once that Microsoft used C++ (as in templates C++) 
> to reimplement a significant chunk of its libc with great success. Less code, 
> less ifdef hell and macro abuse I think were presented as advantages.

Yes, I came late to the game of not using ifdef hell. I'm pretty proud of the 
near complete absence of version() statements in the dmd front end. It didn't 
start out that way!