Nick Sabalausky wrote:
"Walter Bright" <newshou...@digitalmars.com> wrote in message
news:i4nn6k$so...@digitalmars.com...
SK wrote:
Do you mean to say:
Instead of shipping the intermediate code, always ship source code.
Yes.
-or-
Instead of caching the binary, just cache the source code.
Neither of those guesses make general sense so I'm afraid I miss your
point.
Why doesn't it make sense?
The only possible complaints I can think of are:
1. Redoing the parsing and semantic analysis.
It's pretty darned fast.
2. Being uncomfortable about releasing source.
You can turn java bytecodes back into reasonable source code easily enough. And
nothing says you can't run the D code through a comment stripper first.
I'm curious what you have to say about #1. But I consider #2 to be a very
poor reason because:
- There's always reverse engineering.
- There's always obfuscation.
- IL may even provide better reverse-engineering results than machine code,
depending on the IL.
Yes, it can, as Java disassemblers prove.
- All the companies sinking time and money into JS and PHP middleware don't
seem to have a problem with handing out their source.
- If someone's gonna steal a product and rebrand it as their own, they don't
usually need the source, and having it would probably only be of fairly
small help, if any.
- As a customer, the idea of spending money on a product that I can't
service myself if/when the company goes under or loses interest makes me
nervous. Providing their source would given them a competetive advantage.
- Even though providing source gets in the way of effective DRM (as if there
even were such a thing), DRM itself gets in the way of sales.
Yup, no DRM on any products I've built.
- Distributing in source form makes certain things possible that wouldn't
otherwise be, like virtual template functions (in theory, even if not in
actual D practice).
Yup again, Java can't do compile time polymorphism!
BTW, I realized around 10 years ago that what you can do is lex D source and use
the token stream as your "intermediate code". It should work great, be compact,
and fast.
