Replace Runtime Hooks with Templates
- Mentors
- Michael Franklin, Johannes Pfau, wilzbach
- Organization
- D Programming Language
D’s betterC mode is an important tool to be able to use D on bare-metal and embedded platforms. By disabling, for example the class support, the compiles does not need to as many runtime functions and types to be implemented for the code to compile and link. This makes the life of a bare-metal developer much easier.
But there is a catch! A lot of the language features runtime hooks, which in turn requires the TypeInfo class to be able to function. One way of solving both of these problems is by moving runtime hooks to use templates instead. This solves the betterC by removing the dependency of classes (the TypeInfo class), and it solves the safety issue because now the compiler will have all the information about the hook and it can verify it itself and not just trust that the runtime developer remembered to mark the hook correctly.
This proposal will work on translating all the array hooks from using the TypeInfo class to templates.