Compilation strategy

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Sunday, December 16, 2012 23:32:38 Andrej Mitrovic wrote:
> On 12/16/12, Paulo Pinto <pjmlp at progtools.org> wrote:
> > If modules are used correctly, a .di should be created with the public
> > interface and everything else is already in binary format, thus the
> > compiler is not really parsing everything all the time.
> 
> A lot of D code tends to be templated code, .di files don't help you
> in that case.

And .di files don't work with CTFE or inlining. In general, .di files are a 
horrible idea.

I tend to be of the opinion that they shouldn't even exist, but some corporate 
types require that sort of thing when distributing libraries to 3rd parties, 
so we need some sort of header solution. A better one probably would have been 
a binary format where the code is partially compiled with documentation 
providing a human-readable API, but that's something that we'll have to look 
into in the future. For now, we're stuck with .di files.

- Jonathan M Davis