On 01/12/2010 11:40 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
I hope this is not a permanent situation. Shared libraries (not
necessarily DLLs) help reduce the memory usage of all the programs on
the system that use the same libraries, and the footprint of the
binaries.
That would be reasonable once we can get libphobos installed on linux
distributions. Right now, it's easier for users to not have to deal with
version hell for shared libraries. Static linking of phobos does not
impair using D, so it is a lower priority.
That could be a nice goal after D2 is released, but how to handle the
fact that dmd is not open source? Some distro's will probably not accept
it in standard repositories. I think this is unfortunate, since a wider
linux distribution could attract more developers.
The "DLL hell" versioning problem AFAIK is only on Windows,
My experience is different. There are two C shared libraries in common
use on Linux. If I link dmd to one, one group of dmd users gets annoyed,
if I link with the other, the other half gets annoyed. There's no decent
solution.
The preferred solution with a linux system generally is to go all the
way: let the distro packagers handle the dependencies and make them
build dmd. Or have some community build distro specific packages for
you. Both require a redistribution license however, and usually an open
source one.
