On Monday, 17 December 2012 at 22:12:01 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
On 12/17/2012 1:53 PM, Rob T wrote:
I mentioned in a previous post that we should perhaps focus on
making the .di
concept more efficient rather than focus on obfuscation.
We're not going to do obfuscation, because as I explained such
cannot work, and we shouldn't do a disservice to users by
pretending it does. There are many ways that *do* work, such as
PIMPL, which work today and should be used by any organization
wishing to obfuscate their implementation.
I agree.
I suspect most file transport protocols already compress the
data, so compressing it ourselves probably accomplishes
nothing. There are also compressed filesystems, so storing
files in a compressed manner likely accomplishes little.
Yes however my understanding is that html based file transfers
are often not compressed despite the protocol specifically
supporting the feature. The problem is not with the protocol, its
that some clients and servers simply do not implement the feature
or are in a misconfigured state. HTML as you know is very widely
used for transferring files.
Another thing to consider, is for using byte code for
interpretation, that way D could be used directly in game engines
in place of LUA or other scripting methods, or even as a
replacement for Java Script. Of course you know best if this is
practical for a language like D, but maybe a subset of D is
practical, I don't know.
I have toyed with the idea many times, however, of having dmd
support zip files. Zip files can contain an arbitrary file
hierarchy, with individual files in compressed, encrypted, or
plaintext at the selection of the zip builder. An entire
project, or library, or collection of source modules can be
distributed as a zip file, and could be compiled with nothing
more than:
dmd foo.zip
or:
dmd myfile ThirdPartyLib.zip
and have it work. The advantage here is simply that everything
can be contained in one simple file.
The concept is simple. The files in the zip file simply replace
the zip file in the command line. So, if foo.zip contains a.d,
b/c.d, and d.obj, then:
dmd xx foo.zip
is equivalent to:
unzip foo
dmd xx a.d b/c.d d.obj
P.S. I've also wanted to use .zip files as the .lib file format
(!), as the various .lib formats have nothing over .zip files.
Wow, I think that's exactly what we could use! It serves multiple
optional use cases all at once!
Was there a technical reason for you not getting around towards
implementing, or just a lack of time?
--rt
