On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 6:44 PM, Walter Bright <[email protected]> wrote: > > Instead, what you can do is simply dude up command line arguments, spawn the > command line compiler, and collect the result.
Process startup incurs a very large performance hit. Yes, you wouldn't want to be calling even a library compiler in a tight loop, but still, it precludes doing at least semi-realtime things. (though the D compiler is so fast that it doesn't matter much anyway - see h3r3tic's nucled) Another thing having it as a library enables is much simpler IDE integration, as you probably know already. Furthermore, if the compiler's interface is made flexible enough, you can also do some really interesting things - have callbacks for imports which will automatically fetch and install libraries that you don't already have, for instance. Things like DSSS would just become different frontends for the compiler.
