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.