On Tuesday, 24 April 2012 at 01:51:54 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote:
Where DI files come in handy is for commercial libraries that don't want to hand out their source, without DI's that's impossible, therefore for D to be a commercially acceptable language, DI's must work, unfortunately, DI's do not auto-generate to the this requirement right now, I have a patch to fix that. But if you are OSS, you don't really care, just deliver the source as the "library".
DI files are sufficiently auto generated now. Templated functions have to be part of the source code because, well, *they're templates* the compiler needs the source code. Otherwise .di files are just .d files with a different name, you can do forward declarations for defining the interface with a library, I've used it several times.
There is a build tool that will generate the interface files and use those when actually compiling in order to speed up compilation times when doing incremental compilation (don't have to parse as much code).
-- James Miller
