• Mike Parker (24/24) May 18 Rikki's DIP, "Symbol Representation", which deals primarily with

Mike Parker <aldacron gmail.com> writes:

Rikki's DIP, "Symbol Representation", which deals primarily with 
improving how we work with DLLs on Windows, was the first DIP to 
enter Formal Assessment under the new process.

Ideally, we'd like decisions on DIPs to be reached within a 
couple of weeks, but upon reviewing the final edit of the DIP, 
Walter and Atila decided further discussion was warranted.

They had an email discussion about the DIP that included Adam 
Wilson, who has a good bit of experience working with Windows 
DLLs in different contexts. I then set up a meeting that included 
Walter, Atila, Adam, Rikki, and Martin Kinkelin. Martin solved 
LDC's DLL issues a while back, so his perspective was important 
for this discussion.

The end result is that **something** is going to be done, but 
it's probably not going to be the entirety of the solution Rikki 
proposed in the DIP. For now, two exploratory steps have been 
identified that may get us to where we need to be.

One is that some of the work Martin did for LDC will need to be 
upstreamed into DMD. Although the problem being solved here is on 
Windows, the first step here involves upstreaming some 
Mac-specific, Mach-O format changes.

The other is a new import path command-line flag, like the 
`-extI` proposed in the DIP, for use specifically with shared 
libraries.

I'll leave it to others to provide details.