Enhancement idea

[Era Scarecrow]

> Reply to Koroskin,
> 
> > Some guy in a Tango forum complained that he has to
> keep lots of .d
> > files  on his HDD. I agree that this is a bit
> annoying, my D import
> > (not source)  files take up more than 30 mb. While
> this is not a big
> > problem, it should  be taken into consideration,
> especially once our
> > standard library (be it  Tango, Phobos or any other)
> overgrows Boost,
> > Java or C# standard libraries.
> > 
> > So here comes an enhancement proposal: Let DMD
> compiler automatically
> > pickup .zip files in treat (virtually mount) them as a
> folder.
> > What do you think?
> 
> You will have a better case if you use gzip as IIRC DMD
> already uses the 
> gzip library for symbol compression.
> 
> Other than that, a neat idea.

 Slightly off topic, But it is in the same general direction. If you happen to be using a GNU/Linux, you can patch and put on SquashFS, and then simply mount the volume using a loopback device. (I've had wonderful success using the FS).

 For Windows Users, there's 2 approaches that might be usable. Using Gzip compression (zlib) you can simply compress all files, and then in the compiler, decompresses it if it happens to be compressed on each run.

 A second option, this i've seen in Java is there's a library for accessing zip files, allowing you to open the zip file and cycle through all the files one by one, or look it up in a directory structure. Following the same train of thought, you could add support for 7zip file compression. (whole archive compression rather than individual file compression) and yields very good results.

 Era