The Future of D Runtime

[Walter Bright]

On 6/8/2024 8:10 PM, Adam Wilson 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.
> 
> For example, let's say you want to do some asynchronous I/O. Forget the CRT, it 
> just doesn't do that. So off you go to the system API's anyways. Or kludges like 
> Photon. (Don't get me wrong, Photon is a very cool piece of work, but the nature 
> of it's implementation means that it suffers from the inherent limitations and 
> drawbacks of fibers, and does so in a highly obfuscated way.)
> 
> The point is more that if we want to do useful things in the modern world that 
> exists beyond the CRT, then we have to work around it, and if we have to work 
> around it anyways, why are we using it at all?
> 
> If you go with the System API's the world is your oyster. Yes, there is more 
> work upfront, but the number of capabilities we would be able to enable is immense.

I don't understand how the CRT impedes any of that, or why any of it needs to be 
worked around. And D is intended to work with hybrid C/D code, so the CRT 
support needs to be there.

The CRT also does some startup initialization things that need doing, like 
collecting the command line arguments to present to the program.