On Saturday, 5 November 2022 at 01:34:04 UTC, ryuukk_ wrote:
On Friday, 4 November 2022 at 10:57:12 UTC, Hipreme wrote:
Package.d is a real problem existing on our currently modules
design. First is that it means to take the directory name to
use as a module.
This is a problem for 3 reasons:
1. You won't be able to find your module by the file name.
This is incredibly common, for instance, in Visual Studio
Code, when you hit CTRL+P and type the file name, nope, you
will need to write path/to/folder/package.d, beyond that, when
you search package.d there will be so many files with the same
name.
2. As being an exception to how the module system works, this
has already caused me a few headaches (inexplicable bugs),
that happens with symbols aliasing, when the time it happened,
I had no idea on what it could be and I don't even remember
how I solved, instead, I only knew it was related to package.d.
3. I'm currently having a bug on my API module that every
duplicated file name, even when located at different
directories(modules), are generating duplicate symbol. The
major problem is that this is currently undebuggable, as the
MSVC Linker does not show the full directory of the
libraries/object files that caused this clash, not even the
symbol!
The duplicate symbol currently only happens in MSVC Linker,
which makes me think if the bug is in the D language or the
linker itself, as on LLD this does not happen.
So, my current advice is always try making your file names
unique, this will bring a much better debuggability in your
project.
i use that feature a lot, just search with the folder name,
then "package"
https://i.imgur.com/cHb7isl.png
it's also very useful to avoid having all of your code in a
giant unreadable single file
it's also very useful to avoid using dub.. just an import path
to the folder and that's it
https://i.imgur.com/Wy6WOXK.png
also very useful when you want to simplify using importc, put
your c files under the c folder, and the package.d, public
import the c files, and you can put some helper code in D
there, very nice to have
I believe that needing to write `package.d` manually is pretty
useless. Most of the time it means "import everything from this
directory". The only real usage that helped me is when I needed
to create a `version(Release) import something.opt; else
version(Debug) import something.hotload;` basically.
But that does not really require package.d.
Those historic issues that Adam said are the real cause of their
current design.
Take into account how would you do it in Java. `import
mypackage.*;` is how it was done, and I haven't never had any
problem doing this, and this is pretty descriptive.
package.d feels a lot more Haxe's `import.hx`, but it has a main
difference that import.hx is a REAL special file that changes a
bit on what happens on your source files. They are automatically
included in its dir/subdir (think of a per directory object.d).
The problem is that I'm not saying package.d is worthless, but it
is a pool of bugs in the language that needs a real fix and only
that post has already showed 4 bugs people have had. (Although I
still don't like searching files by package.d, it is counter
intuitive).
