The D ecosystem in Debian with free-as-in-freedom DMD

[Jacob Carlborg via Digitalmars-d]

On 2017-04-11 02:20, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 4/10/2017 4:43 PM, David Nadlinger wrote:
>> [1] In fact, it looks like – for example with DMD moving to
>> libunwind-based EH
>> as well – the issue is slowly resolving itself anyway and at some
>> point we'll
>> merely have to sit down for a week and iron out the last few kinks.
>
> dmd is not moving to a libunwind-based EH, it already has moved to it!
>
> But as an example of ABI change, the latest EH @nogc proposal changes
> the layout of the Throwable object, and adds some code to the
> _d_throwdwarf() function.
>
> https://github.com/dlang/druntime/pull/1804

It is possible to solve. For example, in Objective-C they have a 
non-fragile ABI where you can freely add instance variables to base 
classes and the offset will be adjusted automatically at load time for 
the subclasses [1]. The methods are already handled with dynamic message 
dispatch.

[1] 
http://www.sealiesoftware.com/blog/archive/2009/01/27/objc_explain_Non-fragile_ivars.html

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg