On 6/6/2024 11:56 AM, Mathias Lang wrote:
> A resounding yes. Keeping the ability to easily bind to the CRuntime is useful (e.g. being able to spin up a socket and just look at the C documentation), but because it's "good enough", it was never good at all.

By CRT, I mean things like strlen, printf, and setting up the arguments for main(). Not sockets!

On Tuesday, 11 June 2024 at 00:01:01 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 6/8/2024 8:10 PM, Adam Wilson wrote:
>> [...]
>
> I don't understand how the CRT impedes any of that, or why any of it needs to be worked around. And D is intended to work with hybrid C/D code, so the CRT support needs to be there.
>
> The CRT also does some startup initialization things that need doing, like collecting the command line arguments to present to the program.

Why can't these things be in written D? Are we opposed to that or it's a matter of manpower (getting it done)?

On 11/06/2024 9:25 PM, Adam Wilson wrote:
> On Monday, 10 June 2024 at 09:36:14 UTC, Dmitry Olshansky wrote:
> 
>     And on Posix libc is the systems API.
> 
> For some things yes, but if you want to do anything with Async I/O you're going to switch over to something like |select| or |io_uring|.

Not select, that's the hello world of polling functions.

Right now Posix doesn't have anything for async, linux has epoll which can be the equivalent to IOCP.

On Tuesday, 11 June 2024 at 00:01:01 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 6/8/2024 8:10 PM, Adam Wilson wrote:
>> For example, let's say you want to do some asynchronous I/O. Forget the CRT, it just doesn't do that. So off you go to the system API's anyways. Or kludges like Photon. (Don't get me wrong, Photon is a very cool piece of work, but the nature of it's implementation means that it suffers from the inherent limitations and drawbacks of fibers, and does so in a highly obfuscated way.)
>
> I don't understand how the CRT impedes any of that, or why any of it needs to be worked around. And D is intended to work with hybrid C/D code, so the CRT support needs to be there.

Strictly speaking it doesn't "impede" it, but it does introduce multiple code-paths into the code. Let's say you want to do some Async File I/O. You simply can't in CRT because it's just not a thing that CRT does. Since you *have* to write code using the system interfaces to do this, you are going to write the System API path, so why not just use the System API path and cut out the middle-man?

I am not suggesting that we remove support for CRT from the language. Only that we build DRT such that it minimizes or completely removes it's use. We've also discussed a design where we continue to provide a CRT enabled version of DRT to make porting to new platforms easier, but would use the System API code paths by default on systems where those have been implemented. More work, because Phobos would have to be aware that you're using it and appropriately remove the code that CRT cannot support, but potentially worth it.

> The CRT also does some startup initialization things that need doing, like collecting the command line arguments to present to the program.

On Windows you use `CommandLineToArgvW`, on Linux/BSD's you might actually use the CRT, I don't know what the equivalent is on MacOS.

On Tuesday, 11 June 2024 at 08:40:32 UTC, aberba wrote:
> Why can't these things be in written D? Are we opposed to that or it's a matter of manpower (getting it done)?

They can be done in D, and doing them in D would likely open us up to interesting use cases, like OSdev (since they no longer have to port CRT first), or acting as a bootstrap Runtime for modern languages that want to provide more than CRT.

However, we do have to be realistic about our manpower constraints. But if you're offering to lend a hand ... we'll take it!

On Tuesday, 11 June 2024 at 09:30:17 UTC, Richard (Rikki) Andrew Cattermole wrote:
> Not select, that's the hello world of polling functions.
>
> Right now Posix doesn't have anything for async, linux has epoll which can be the equivalent to IOCP.

Oh, I know. I was just working off you prior use of it as an example.