On Friday, 1 February 2013 at 15:08:00 UTC, Leandro Lucarella
wrote:
Dicebot, el 1 de February a las 10:42 me escribiste:
Still, no need for internal linkage is felt because D projects
are
very small nowadays and does not involve complex separate
compilation systems and\or large teams of programmers working
on a
single project. What internal linkage gives you is hard 100%
guarantee (verified by the compiler) that this piece of code
may be
changed as you wish and it won't affect anything but this
module.
Private can't give such guarantees without code breakage. It
is a
widely used idiom in C/C++ that D currently has no replacement.
Unfortunately D is different in this regard than C/C++ (yes, I
said
unfortunately :P). Separate compilation in D is not that
useful, as
interfaces are not clearly defined (at a file level). When you
import
something, you are importing the implementation, not only the
interface.
Is really hard to decouple both in D. I tried to play around
with
separate (and incremental) compilation in D without much luck.
And
I wonder if it ever will make any sense to compile separately
instead of
all in one go.
Because of this, even when I agree about the goodness of "static
linkage" (as in C/C++), I don't see real value in this proposal
for D.
PS: Yes, I know there are the .di files, but even trying to use
that
makes thing extremely hard, because you need to parse the
whole file
to generate it and the difference between parsing and
compiling is
not that much. And then, as in C++, you have templates.
There are other languages with modules that also have generics,
although not as powerful as D's templates, surely they could be
used as inspiration for how they are storing information on the
compiled modules.
--
Paulo
