On Tuesday, 24 April 2012 at 01:51:54 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote:
On Wed, 18 Apr 2012 03:02:49 -0700, Robert Clipsham
<[email protected]> wrote:
On 18/04/2012 09:18, "Erèbe" wrote:
Hi,
I recently discovered that D support file interface .di, but
through my
past reads I never seen someone using it. The std don't do
usage of it
(compile time issue maybe ?) and most of D project are in the
same case.
Is this feature depreceated ?
I'm from a C++ background, I agree on the fact that keeping
declarations
and implementaions sync across two files is tedious, but when
I have to
read code, I like a clean interface to summarize the thing.
Dmd doc is there to replace the need of an clean interface ?
You can find a list of deprecated features here:
http://dlang.org/deprecate
.di files are not deprecated, just rarely used. This is for a
few reasons:
* There is no requirement to use them
* They severely limit the capabilities of CTFE
(http://dlang.org/function#interpretation)
* DMD is really fast - the speed gain from using .di files
isn't noticeable for a lot of projects
* If you want them, they're very easy to generate yourself
(use the -Dd and -Df compiler switches)
* For the purposes of reading APIs, DDoc is normally used -
alternatively, all good editors and IDEs provide code folding
to hide implementations
Where DI files come in handy is for commercial libraries that
don't want to hand out their source, without DI's that's
impossible, therefore for D to be a commercially acceptable
language, DI's must work, unfortunately, DI's do not
auto-generate to the this requirement right now, I have a patch
to fix that. But if you are OSS, you don't really care, just
deliver the source as the "library".
D could see use an approach similar to what Delphi does, where
the tooling is able to extract the information from the .tpu
files (delphi libraries), as far as I can remember. Go has a
similar approach where the package information is stored in a
special section in the library/object files.
But I guess di files are anyway easier to maintain.
