Luca's meaningless thoughts  

Now that we can compile druntime, we should be able to compile some programs that use our fresh, modified, druntime library.

Since DMD 2.021, druntime is built into phobos, so if we want to test some code we need to rebuild phobos too, to include our new druntime.

Since I'm particularly interested in the GC, let's say we want to use the GC stub implementation (instead of the basic default).

We can add a simple "init" message to see that something is actually happening. For example, open src/gc/stub/gc.d and add this import:

private import core.sys.posix.unistd: write;

Then, in the gc_init() function add this line:

write(1, "init\n".ptr, 5);

Now, we must tell druntime we want to use the stub GC implementation. Edit dmd-posix.mak, search for DIR_GC variable and change it from basic to stub:

DIR_GC=gc/stub

Great, now recompile druntime.

Finally, go to your DMD installation, and edit src/phobos/linux.mak. Search for the DRUNTIME variable and set it to the path to your newly generated libdruntime.a (look in the druntime lib directory). For me it's something like:

DRUNTIME=/home/luca/tesis/druntime/lib/libdruntime.a

Now recompile phobos. I have to do this, because my DMD compiler is named dmd2:

make -f linux.mak DMD=dmd2

Now you can compile some trivial D program (compile it in the src druntime directory so its dmd.conf is used to search for the libraries and imports) and see how "init" get printed when the program starts. For example:

druntime/src$ cat hello.d

import core.sys.posix.unistd: write;

void main()
{
    write(1, "hello!\n".ptr, 7);
}

druntime/src$ dmd2 -L-L/home/luca/tesis/dmd2/lib hello.d
druntime/src$ ./hello
init
hello!

Note that I passed my DMD compiler's lib path so it can properly find the newly created libphobos2.a.