D with minimal runtime

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 6/18/20 8:10 AM, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
> On Tuesday, 16 June 2020 at 01:08:16 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> The new merged library ("hall" in honor of Asaph Hall who discovered 
>> Phobos and Deimos) would be built under a strict pay-as-you-go regime. 
>> That means an empty main uses virtually nothing, a main with a 
>> writeln() uses a little I/O, a main that allocates memory brings the 
>> GC in play (which auto-initializes on the first call), etc.
> 
> How would that interact with architecture-based constraints (e.g. issues 
> porting libraries in their entirety because of architecture-specific 
> limitations, missing assembly implementations, etc.)?

I assume porting a pay-as-you-go library would be easier to port than a 
monolithic one.

> Is it possible to ensure there is a well-defined "pay for what you can" 
> separation of concerns, as well as "pay-as-you-go"?

I don't know. That would be for the crack team that hasn't been 
assembled yet :o). What I can tell is that in a large project, whatever 
people pay attention to will work well. Whatever people don't pay 
attention to will work poorly. For example: in Phobos I paid little 
attention to things like object file size, linking in code, mutual 
dependencies, or separating memory allocation from other work. These 
aspects did not evolve well.

> P.S. I think you should call the library Asaph, it's more distinctive ;-)

Another decision for them!