A special treat

[Craig Black]

"Andrei Alexandrescu" <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote in message 
news:hks6qm$26r3$1 at digitalmars.com...
> Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>> On Tue, 09 Feb 2010 10:53:47 -0500, Steve Teale 
>> <steve.teale at britseyeview.com> wrote:
>>
>>> When D2 is 'frozen', as a special treat would it be possible for it to 
>>> be
>>> able to generate object files that could be converted into shared
>>> libraries, and for Phobos to be a shared library to support same.
>>>
>>> I have tried every which way I can think of to create shared libraries
>>> using D. The closest I have come is with the old 1.030 GDC, and even 
>>> with
>>> that there are problems. I've tried to describe the current situation in
>>> some detail on the blog section of my <a href="http://
>>> www.britseyeview.com/GDC-newbie.html">GDC-newbie page</a>. It is too 
>>> long
>>> to post on the newsgroup.
>>>
>>> The inability to do this is a real show-stopper for D on Linux, and
>>> unless things have got better since I last tried, the same can be said
>>> for Windows DLLs.
>>>
>>> Please!
>>
>> Many (including myself) have expressed the real requirement for shared 
>> libraries.  Sometimes the response is "oh who needs shared libraries 
>> anyways, there is so much memory in todays computers" and the other 
>> response is that "Windows DLLs suck, so we can't do it".
>>
>> I agree it needs to be figured out before D is considered a viable 
>> professional language.  I don't think it's impossible, but someone just 
>> needs to spend the time.
>>
>> Another new problem to pile on to Windows DLLs is the new requirement for 
>> default thread local storage.  See this bug that is very unlikely to get 
>> fixed (by Microsoft):
>>
>> http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=3342
>>
>> So the tradeoff is, either use crappy TLS (using a function to look up 
>> global variables) or only support Windows Vista and later.  If Windows 7 
>> hadn't come out, I'd say requiring Vista is about as bad as not having 
>> DLLs :)
>>
>> -Steve
>
> A lot of Phobos consists of templates, which would be difficult to put in 
> a shared library.
>
> Andrei

Sure but I bet a lot of it doesn't consist of templates.  Even with highly 
templated code, there is still a lot to be gained from this IMO.

-Craig