bflat VS dmd

The sibling pretty much sums it up. But if you want more detail, read on:

Generally, there are three publishing options that each make sense depending on scenario:

JIT + host runtime: by definition portable, includes slim launcher executable for convenience, the platform for which can be specified with e.g. -r osx-arm64[0].

JIT + self-contained runtime: this includes IL assemblies and runtime together, either within a single file or otherwise (so it looks like AOT, just one bin/exe). These requires specifying RID, like in the previous option.

AOT: statically linked native binary, cross-OS compilation is not supported officially[1] because macOS is painful in general, and Windows<->Linux/FreeBSD is a configuration nightmare - IL AOT Compiler depends on Clang or MSVC and a native linker so it is subject to restrictions of those as a start. But it can be done and there are alternate, more focused toolchains, that offer it, like Bflat[1].

If you just want a hello world AOT application, then the shortest path to that is `dotnet new console --aot && dotnet publish -o {folder}`.

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/rid-catalog

[1] https://github.com/bflattened/bflat (can also build UEFI binaries, lol)

See here

See B flat

I've been wondering how to integrate modern .NET Core into a custom build system (buck2) and was wondering similar things. There's this project I think is cool called bflat[1] that basically makes the C# compiler more like the Go compiler in the sense it's a one-shot single-use tool that can cross compile binaries natively. It's done by one of the people on the .NET Runtime team as a side project, but quite neat.

I think in practice you're supposed to compile whole .dll's or assemblies all at once, which acts as the unit of compilation; I don't think the csharp compiler generates native object-files-for-every-.cs, the kind of approach you'd expect from javac or g++. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong though! I'd like to learn more about this.

[1] https://github.com/bflattened/bflat

You can compile without a GC using https://github.com/bflattened/bflat

nice. have you tried compile it using https://github.com/bflattened/bflat to have native executable? as long as you don't have PackgeReference it can be compiled using bflat instead of full dotnet

The creator actually addresses this issue:

Here's the pipeline spitting out the same error as on my macbook did.

https://github.com/dlang/dmd/actions/runs/8023469412/job/219...

Not completely on topic (if you read TFA) but my favorite Git commit is by compiler badass and HN frequenter, where he checks in an entire C compiler to the D language repo:

https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/12507

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27102584

A new generated code alone is 4000 lines long [1]. The actual code added is just 2000 lines, and some are used to pay debts, I mean, to make a proper code generator (which can be alternatively written in a simpler scripting langauge). In any case it is never comparable to the entier C parser proper.

[1] https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/15307/files#diff-3677bcc89...

D is completely opensource already (https://github.com/dlang/dmd). The "open" of OpenD is just ADR saying that OpenD will be more open to new language features than D has historically been.

The reference compiler, DMD, is open source: https://github.com/dlang/dmd

But they don't accept just any Pull Request or features the community submits, understandably. There's a process called DIP for language improvements: https://github.com/dlang/DIPs/blob/master/DIPs/README.md

However, by some accounts, it's really hard to get anything through.

Given D already has so many feature, I find that to be a good thing , to be honest, by not everyone agrees, of course.