CTFE and DI: The Crossroads of D

[Adam Wilson]

On Wed, 09 May 2012 15:55:36 -0700, Mehrdad <wfunction at hotmail.com> wrote:

>> I am 100% for this. It would be very .NET like. In fact I'm curious  
>> enough what it would take to make this work that I could see myself  
>> trying. My guess is that it needs a new linker with the glorious  
>> side-effect of dumping optlink! In that case it would mean upgrading  
>> the D backend to emit COFF (ELF and Mach-O already support custom  
>> sections), which I am fine with trying to do. Then you would add your  
>> AST or other intermediate representations to a custom section in the  
>> object file and the linker could then link it in. D would then need a  
>> way to extract said information. Which would not be terribly hard.  
>> Except that you'll have to train other compilers how to read that IR.  
>> Maybe we could train D to read the LLVM IR?
>
>
> :O I was writing a response pretty much exactly like this (i.e. doing  
> what .NET does), but then I dumped it, thinking it'd be dismissed as too  
> huge of a change...

:-D This isn't the first time it's been suggested in recent forum history.  
I think there is a significant body of support for making D libraries  
single file with no import files, it solves a *TON* of issues around how  
to import API's. I imagine that it's much the same reason .NET went with  
their metadata plan. And ended up where we are suggesting to go.

-- 
Adam Wilson
IRC: LightBender
Project Coordinator
The Horizon Project
http://www.thehorizonproject.org/