On 11/29/17 9:16 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
On 11/29/2017 3:36 PM, Jon Degenhardt wrote:
On Wednesday, 29 November 2017 at 16:57:36 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
While generally I would still use fullblown D rather than BetterC for
my projects, the bloat from druntime/phobos does still bother me at
the back of my mind. IIRC, the Phobos docs used to state that the
philosophy for Phobos is pay-as-you-go. As in, if you don't use
feature X, the code and associated data that implements feature X
shouldn't even appear in the executable. It seems that we have fallen
away from that for a while now. Perhaps it's time to move D back in
that direction.
If there specific apps where druntime and/or phobos bloat is thought
to be too high, it might be worth trying the new LDC support for
building a binary with druntime and phobos compiled with LTO (Link
Time Optimization). I saw reduced binary sizes on my apps, it'd be
interesting to hear other experiences.
Ideally, the druntime library should be come with the operating system
so every user has a copy of it. Practically, I can't see that happening
for the foreseeable future. It doesn't even happen for Windows with
Microsoft's own compiler.
But even though it doesn't come with Windows, it can be installed once,
and shared between all applications that use it.
The issue with druntime isn't that it's not installed, it's the static
linking.
A second problem is that due to the way D works most of the time (with
templates just about everywhere), each new release is likely to be
binary-incompatible. So you will essentially need many copies of
druntime, probably one per release that was used to compile any D
programs on your system. But this is much less of an issue, especially
if there are many programs that build using the same release.
-Steve
