On Tuesday, 20 June 2017 at 13:45:31 UTC, Mike wrote:
IMO, to make D a pleasant experience on the ARM Cortex-M platform, we'll need to implement the entire druntime including threading, GC, exceptions, dynamic arrays, etc... even if those features are not used. This is because D just hasn't been designed and implemented in a modular fashion to allow one to pay-as-they-go, and as you experienced in one of your other posts today, you just get too many undefined references and other odd errors that have nothing to do with your code. The only way to make those errors go away is to ensure everything in druntime is there.
The more I think about this, the more it seems like the best approach. All this time I've been trying to find a way to build just enough runtime code to support the features I'm using, and I've only encountered frustration. It's a shame that we have to build such a massive amount of infrastructure just to get a build, only to have the linker strip it all away, but apparently that's just the way things are.
Forget -betterC and -no-rtti; embrace it all! We might just be be able to turn this lemon into lemonade afterall.
I'm having a bit of a change of heart (or maybe there's something in my coffee). I'll be traveling overseas for the next month, so when I return I'll revisit this and see if it still appeals to me.
Mike
