Compilation strategy

[foobar]

On Tuesday, 18 December 2012 at 00:48:40 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:

>> Wow, I think that's exactly what we could use! It serves 
>> multiple optional use
>> cases all at once!
>>
>> Was there a technical reason for you not getting around 
>> towards implementing, or
>> just a lack of time?
>
> There always seemed something more important to be doing, and 
> Andrei thought it would be better to put such a capability in 
> rdmd rather than dmd.

This is inconsistent with D's design - providing useful features 
built-in (docs generator, testing, profiling, etc).
More over, it breaks encapsulation. This means the compiler 
exposes an inferior format that will later be wrapped around by a 
more capable packaging format, thus exposing the implementation 
details and adding an external dependency on that inferior 
format. Besides, the other compilers merge in the same front-end 
code so they'll gain the same feature anyway. There's no gain in 
separating it out to rdmd.

The main question is if you approve the concept and willing to 
put it on the to-do list? I'm sure that if you endorse this 
feature someone else will come in and implement it.