[D-runtime] Time for druntime for Linux64 to default to a shared lib

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Wednesday, March 13, 2013 13:07:21 Walter Bright wrote:
> On 3/13/2013 12:32 PM, Brad Roberts wrote:
> > I fully agree with the "its too soon" sentiment.  There's a set of people
> > that _really_ want it, and I think it's fairly safe to assume that they'll
> > play and report issues.  No need to inflict the pain on everyone until
> > SOME people have kicked the tires.  Reach out, engage with some people.
> > Get SOME realish world testing done.
> 
> It ain't real unless the autotester is testing it!

Then I'm sure that builds could be set up which tested the shared library 
version.

But we stand a very high risk of breaking everybody's code if we switch to 
shared as the default without ironing it out first. While, I expect that we'll 
find the more obvious issues before we actually make a release, we may end up 
with more subtle issues which we don't detect immediately but still end up 
affecting a large portion of our user base.

Merely announcing that druntime itself supposed to work with the -shared flag 
now would result in a lot of people testing it, because a lot of people want 
that. Just look at how many people messed around with UDAs as soon as you 
announced them. If need be, we can create zip file marked as "experimental" so 
that people can mess around with it, and I fully expect that plenty of people 
will. But even just changing dmd.conf is going to break a lot of people's dmd 
installs, so lets not jump the gun on this.

By the way, why is the default dmd.conf not part of the dmd repo? As far as I 
can tell, it doesn't exist in source control at all, and that makes it 
_extremely_ easy for anyone using anything other than the official releases to 
miss updates to it.

- Jonathan m Davis