D with minimal runtime

Andrei Alexandrescu SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org
Tue Jun 16 01:08:16 UTC 2020


On 6/15/20 6:01 AM, IGotD- wrote:
> I'm looking for a minimal druntime too. Right now it is all or nothing 
> for druntime and it expect a full rich OS. There have been talks to 
> partion druntime better so that you can incremental support, for example 
> leave networking out if you want to. Also right now for all operating 
> systems, druntime depends on clib itself. Nim has a compiler switch 
> -os:any which means that the runtime will only depend on clib which 
> makes it very portable. That would have been nice in druntime too.

We really need to merge druntime and phobos in one. The entire 
distinction has long become nonsensical.

The new merged library ("hall" in honor of Asaph Hall who discovered 
Phobos and Deimos) would be built under a strict pay-as-you-go regime. 
That means an empty main uses virtually nothing, a main with a writeln() 
uses a little I/O, a main that allocates memory brings the GC in play 
(which auto-initializes on the first call), etc.

Templates and deduction must be heavily favored over old crummy C 
bindings. E.g. writeln() should actually link little else than a call to 
the fwrite() function.

We'd need at least 2 solid engineers for that.


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