"Richard Krehbiel" <krehbiel3@comcast.net> wrote in message news:a72ou0$950$1@digitaldaemon.com...

> > This won't work for something intended to live in a library, but will
for
> > exe's. That's why I see the linker eventually merging into the compiler,
> so
> > the compiler knows what the end result will be.
>
> So this means D will be bad for creating libraries?  I don't think this is
a
> good idea.
>
> I think you'd better have your language prepared to deal with the dumb linker for quite a while yet, and that means adding the "final" keyword.
If
> you want to make your compiler smart enough, that's fine, but allow me to tell the compiler when I'm building a library.

I guess merging the linker with the compiler is the step to the right direction - Borland did it long ago with Pascal, and you can see the results now, build environment is much friendly than that of C.

This, however, doesn't mean that D support for libraries is bad. It's just the compiler-linker is aware of every aspect of your library, and is able to make functions non-virtual and/or inline by itself.

"final" is for other purposes, as I've stated in my previous post, and, well, seems like we'll see it quite soon in D.