Shared libraries, symbol visibilities, Posix vs. Windows

[Lance Bachmeier]

On Thursday, 16 May 2024 at 13:00:44 UTC, kinke wrote:

> As is hopefully clear by now, it's archaic Windows which 
> complicates matters enormously wrt. shared libraries. My strong 
> opinion on this is that the D language itself shouldn't cater 
> to its limitations - we try to do our best (with reasonable 
> effort) to make things work on Windows too (Rainer Schütze has 
> been working on adopting the LDC scheme to DMD, some things 
> landed already), but the OS is just too primitive to handle all 
> cases without too much Windows-only effort (like adding our own 
> D-specific extra indirection for all symbols to implement a 
> unified state, or wrapping TLS variables with functions - all 
> stuff the compiler could do, but just for a crappy operating 
> system?).

WSL works very well these days. Not long ago I tried to get 
someone using D on Windows (they'd have been creating shared 
libraries). I eventually gave up on the "native" effort and told 
them to try WSL. They installed everything themselves and got on 
with their work.

I don't know how feasible WSL is as a general solution, but it's 
a native Windows solution that's part of the OS, and additional 
Windows-only effort is only a benefit in situations where you 
need to take a different approach.