On Wed, 09 May 2012 15:55:36 -0700, Mehrdad <[email protected]> wrote:
I am 100% for this. It would be very .NET like. In fact I'm curious
enough what it would take to make this work that I could see myself
trying. My guess is that it needs a new linker with the glorious
side-effect of dumping optlink! In that case it would mean upgrading
the D backend to emit COFF (ELF and Mach-O already support custom
sections), which I am fine with trying to do. Then you would add your
AST or other intermediate representations to a custom section in the
object file and the linker could then link it in. D would then need a
way to extract said information. Which would not be terribly hard.
Except that you'll have to train other compilers how to read that IR.
Maybe we could train D to read the LLVM IR?
:O I was writing a response pretty much exactly like this (i.e. doing
what .NET does), but then I dumped it, thinking it'd be dismissed as too
huge of a change...
:-D This isn't the first time it's been suggested in recent forum history.
I think there is a significant body of support for making D libraries
single file with no import files, it solves a *TON* of issues around how
to import API's. I imagine that it's much the same reason .NET went with
their metadata plan. And ended up where we are suggesting to go.
--
Adam Wilson
IRC: LightBender
Project Coordinator
The Horizon Project
http://www.thehorizonproject.org/
