DIP11: Automatic downloading of libraries

[Daniel Murphy]

"Jacob Carlborg" <doob at me.com> wrote in message 
news:iti35g$2r4r$2 at digitalmars.com...
>
> That seems cool. But, you would want to write the pluing in D and that's 
> not possible yet on all platforms? Or should everything be done with 
> extern(C), does that work?
>

Yeah, it won't be possible to do it all in D until we have .so's working on 
linux etc, which I think is a while off yet.  Although this could be worked 
around by writing a small loader in c++ and using another process (written 
in D) to do the actual work.  Maybe it would be easier to build dmd as a 
shared lib (or a static lib) and just provide a different front...

My point is that the compiler can quite easily be modified to allow it to 
pass pretty much anything (missing imports, pragma(lib), etc) to a build 
tool, and it should be fairly straightforward for the build tool to pass 
things back in (adding objects to the linker etc).  This could allow single 
pass full compilation even when the libraries need to be fetched off the 
internet.  It could also allow seperate compilation of several source files 
at once, without having to re-do parsing+semantic each time.  Can dmd 
currently do this?
Most importantly it keeps knowledge about urls and downloading files outside 
the compiler, where IMO it does not belong.