On this newsgroup with Jonathan M Davis, we started discussing export.
As it was off topic, and as it was interesting, I wish to bring it here.
As most of you know, all symbol on posix systems are export, but not on
windows. As D have an export keyword, the question is what to do with it.
The need for change in the UNIX world of this behavior exists, and some
move has been made in direction of explicitly hiding symbols ( see
http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/Visibility ).
For consistency across systems, I suggest that, unless marked as
exported, symbols are hidden by default. This have other advantages as
shown in the linked page about gcc. For D, it also mean that the linker
will have all information to finalize all methods that are not marked as
export, and I think this is something we want to mitigate the cost of
all methods virtual by default.
The site says : « Export means that any code outside the executable
can access the member. Export is analogous to exporting
definitions from a DLL. » so, clearly it is not saying anything
about posix systems (you'll not find many DLL on those) and not what D
compiler does.
It means that export comes as an extra qualifier, and not as an
alternative to public/private/protected/package . You can be both export
AND public/private/protected/package .
This already have been discussed here, but no conclusion has been made.
