On Wednesday, 3 October 2018 at 14:27:42 UTC, Dejan Lekic wrote:
IDK, I prefer things done in the UNIX way - do one thing and do
it right. Compiler should do what its name says - COMPILE,
while some other tool should be made for these kind of code
checks. The code will compile no matter whether there are some
unused imports or not, right?
Sure, the Unix way is a nice philosophy, but let's face the facts:
- Because of (amongst others) CTFE and mixin, D is an incredibly
complicated language to reason about (unlike Java or C#)
- There is only one D front-end, and it will likely stay that way
for a while
- Any static analysis tool that doesn't only work with a subset
of the language must basically re-implement a complete compiler
front-end or leverage dmd
Also dmd is currently not following the Unix way by a long shot.
You could have separate programs for the optimizer and assembler,
like some compilers have. Every stage of compilation could be a
separate program, and that would even be beneficial to static
analysis tools, but that has other problems too (like changes in
the API, worse performance because of text input and output).
Currently we have a package that does everything that requires
intricate knowledge of the D language: compiling, documentation
generation, profiling, and warning about things like dead code.
Also unit-testing is part of the language and the standard
library is huge. Warning about unused imports seems like a useful
addition to me.
