Project Ideas

Lowerer

This tool would "translate" compilable D code to compilable D code. See initial idea discussed in Issue 5051. It would offer a variety of lowering services for purposes of tooling, debugging, and project management:

• do not output function bodies, .di style

• write deduced attributes for functions (useful when function bodies are not written)

• expand all possible mixins in the code

• execute lookup on all symbols and write the full symbol, e.g. writeln becomes .std.stdio.writeln

• explicitate all user-defined operators, e.g. a + b becomes a.opBinary!"+"(b)

• replace all wholesale imports with detailed imports that specify the symbols needed

• write specialized versions for all templates used within the module (this is likely to be tricky)

• lower all scope statements into try statements

• lower all foreach statements into for statements

• specify the exact symbols needed for each import statement (which means: if no symbols, the import is redundant - easy to mark as a warning by a subsequent tool)

• evaluate all static ifs possible

• lower code using version(), i.e. make the unused branch disappear

• make all comments disappear

• make only non-documentation comments disappear

• evaluate all possible CTFEs (tricky)

• introduce named values instead of temporaries wherever order of evaluations is defined