The Future of D Runtime

[Adam Wilson]

On Saturday, 8 June 2024 at 21:15:39 UTC, monkyyy wrote:
> On Friday, 7 June 2024 at 01:23:03 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> Is relying on the C runtime library really a problem? It's 
>> probably the most debugged library in history, and it's small 
>> and lightweight.
>
> Depends on goals, if your targeting moving d to a higher level, 
> wasm+libc will just suck(they broke file i/o despite w3c lying, 
> it will always be a weird edge case you have to specifically 
> support) and I think a go/swift apooch  of an std making a 
> non-c api will probably be best
>
> If you want to compete on the low level zig competing with c 
> involves competing with libc; other platforms, new chips; maybe 
> things break weirdly or they have bad workarounds
>
> if you want to keep d exactly where it is; I cant imagine much 
> reason to change libc dependence its fine for windows and linux 
> and fake linux; so is there going to be a major push for wasm 
> or embedded?

I broadly agree with this assessment.

Moving up level necessarily means broadening out beyond the CRT.

Moving down is something we're not well equipped to handle as you 
start to compete on execution speed, which means esoteric 
back-end optimizations, which is something DMD sucks at so we use 
LDC/GDC. And since LLVM and GCC already exist and we're already 
using them, we've already admitted that we're not going down that 
path.

Staying where we are means stagnation. Let's not do that.

And WASM keeps coming up as a priority for DLF so I think we can 
all see where this is headed.