D as a Better C

[Michael V. Franklin via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Thursday, 24 August 2017 at 19:21:31 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 8/24/2017 11:56 AM, Walter Bright wrote:
>>> I find -betterC to be somewhat of a copout for avoiding the 
>>> hard work of improving D's implementation.
>> 
>> On the contrary, I view it as providing motivation for dealing 
>> with those issues. The PR above is stalled for lack of 
>> motivation.
>
> -betterC also brings into sharp focus exactly what the issues 
> are.

Great! I look forward to seeing improvements and hope to help.

Allow me to point out a recent pull request that should have 
resulted in an improvement in the full-featured D implementation 
rather than the -betterC implementation.

https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/6918

DMD should never link in Phobos or druntime automatically. 
Rather, I think such dependencies should be specified on a 
platform-by-platform basis using a dmd.conf, linker script, or 
some other configuration file that is distributed with the 
toolchain's package.

This puts the power in the hands of the user to avoid linking in 
Phobos and druntime without having to use the -betterC switch 
which is especially useful if the user is providing their own 
minimal runtime implementation to support features of D that are 
excluded with the heavy hand of -betterC.

Mike