Thoughts about D

[Walter Bright]

On 11/29/2017 3:36 PM, Jon Degenhardt wrote:
> On Wednesday, 29 November 2017 at 16:57:36 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>> While generally I would still use fullblown D rather than BetterC for my 
>> projects, the bloat from druntime/phobos does still bother me at the back of 
>> my mind.  IIRC, the Phobos docs used to state that the philosophy for Phobos 
>> is pay-as-you-go. As in, if you don't use feature X, the code and associated 
>> data that implements feature X shouldn't even appear in the executable. It 
>> seems that we have fallen away from that for a while now.  Perhaps it's time 
>> to move D back in that direction.
> 
> If there specific apps where druntime and/or phobos bloat is thought to be too 
> high, it might be worth trying the new LDC support for building a binary with 
> druntime and phobos compiled with LTO (Link Time Optimization). I saw reduced 
> binary sizes on my apps, it'd be interesting to hear other experiences.

Ideally, the druntime library should be come with the operating system so every 
user has a copy of it. Practically, I can't see that happening for the 
foreseeable future. It doesn't even happen for Windows with Microsoft's own 
compiler.