"SK" <s...@metrokings.com> wrote in message news:mailman.445.1282371389.13841.digitalmar...@puremagic.com... > On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 10:11 PM, Walter Bright > <newshou...@digitalmars.com> wrote: >> SK wrote: >>> >>> Do you mean to say: >>> Instead of shipping the intermediate code, always ship source code. >> >> Yes. >> Why doesn't it make sense? > > I love open source projects, but off the top of my head here are some > reasons that's not a general substitute for TIMI for D:
I agree there are some benefits, but I suspect they may be smaller than they seem: > 1) What about closed source software? True. Although IMO (see my post in another branch of this thread) closed-source is rarely, if ever, beneficial anyway, despite how it's often perceived. > 2) From-source builds may be more complex or resource consuming than > could be accommodated on the machine the customer used to launch, e.g. > a hand-held device. I can't imagine it would be significantly more than something like JIT (or non-JIT interpreted code). Unless it's C++, of course. > 3) The source may have sizable irrelevant content for a particular > product instantiation, compile time conditionals, etc > - Unless I'm just becoming a dinosaur, sizeable content is rarely code. More likely other binary assets. - Code can be huffman-compressed with significant size savings and quickly/easily unzipped on-the-fly. Even the GBA has some built-in on-the-fly unzipping ability that was often used in games (for assets though, not code). - I don't think I've ever seen a cross-platform program that had platform-specific code that made up any more than a small fraction of the total code. Of course, I'm not saying that using source as IL is universially, undeniably, better period, no matter what, or anything like that. I agree that binary IL has some nice aspects. I'm just not convinced that it's as much of an improvement over source-as-IL as it would initially seem.