On Friday, 19 October 2012 at 00:14:18 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
On Thu, 18 Oct 2012 12:11:13 +0200
"foobar" <[email protected]> wrote:
How often large binary blobs are literally spelled in the
source code (as opposed to just being read from a file)?
Frequency isn't the issue. The issues are "*Is* it ever
needed?" and
"When it is needed, is it useful enough?" The answer to both is
most
certainly "yes". (Remember, D is supposed to usable as a systems
language, it's not merely a high-level-app-only language.)
Any real-world use cases to support this claim? Does C++ have
such a feature?
My limited experience with kernels is that this feature is not
needed. The solution we used for this was to define an extern
symbol and load it with a linker script (the binary data was of
course stored in separate files).
Keep in mind, the question "Does it pull it's own weight?" is
for
adding new features, not for going around gutting the language
just because we can.
Ok, I grant you that but remember that the whole thread started
because the feature _doesn't_ work so lets rephrase - is it worth
the effort to fix this feature?
In any case, I'm not opposed to such a utility library, in
fact I think it's a rather good idea and we already have a
precedent with "oct!"
I just don't think this belongs as a built-in feature in the
language.
I think monarch_dodra's test proves that it definitely needs to
be
built-in.
It proves that DMD has bugs that should be fixed, nothing more.
