Rikki's DIP, "Symbol Representation", which deals primarily with
improving how we work with DLLs on Windows, was the first DIP to
enter Formal Assessment under the new process.
Ideally, we'd like decisions on DIPs to be reached within a
couple of weeks, but upon reviewing the final edit of the DIP,
Walter and Atila decided further discussion was warranted.
They had an email discussion about the DIP that included Adam
Wilson, who has a good bit of experience working with Windows
DLLs in different contexts. I then set up a meeting that included
Walter, Atila, Adam, Rikki, and Martin Kinkelin. Martin solved
LDC's DLL issues a while back, so his perspective was important
for this discussion.
The end result is that **something** is going to be done, but
it's probably not going to be the entirety of the solution Rikki
proposed in the DIP. For now, two exploratory steps have been
identified that may get us to where we need to be.
One is that some of the work Martin did for LDC will need to be
upstreamed into DMD. Although the problem being solved here is on
Windows, the first step here involves upstreaming some
Mac-specific, Mach-O format changes.
The other is a new import path command-line flag, like the
`-extI` proposed in the DIP, for use specifically with shared
libraries.
I'll leave it to others to provide details.
