On Thu, 1 Jul 2010 19:34:09 -0700, Jonathan M Davis <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Thursday, July 01, 2010 19:13:02 Rainer Deyke wrote: > > On 7/1/2010 19:32, Jonathan M Davis wrote: > > > By the way, why _does_ D mangle its names? What's the advantage? I > > > understood that C++ does it because it was forced to back in the days > > > when it was transformed into C code during compilation but that it's now > > > generally considered a legacy problem that we're stuck with rather than > > > something that would still be considered a good design decision. > > > > > > So, why did D go with name mangling? It certainly makes stuff like stack > > > traces harder to deal with. I've never heard of any advantage to name > > > mangling, only disadvantages. > > > > Because DMD is stuck with a C-age linker. > > Well, I guess that it just goes to show how little I understand about exactly > how linking works when I don't understand what that means. After all, C > doesn't > using name mangling. Does that mean that name mangling it meant as a > namespacing > tool to ensure that no D function could possibly have the same linking name > as a > C function? > > - Jonathan M Davis
C doesn't require mangling because functions can't be overloaded. To make D (or C++) compatible with C linkers, symbol names need to be unique, so functions with identical names but different types need to be represented with different symbols.
