On Friday, May 31, 2013 13:06:13 Regan Heath wrote: > .di files are .d files without the function bodies etc. There are issues > with templates and auto, but we will eventually have nice solutions for > those.
The only problem with auto is that the type can't be inferred without the function body. But all of the information is there. So, all you have to do is make it so that the function doesn't return auto (or so that the variable declaration uses the actual type instead of auto). For non-templated functions, that's trivial. .di generation could automate that better, but it's not a big deal. The situation with templates is basically the same as it is with C++. They have to go in the interface/header file and always will. There's no way around that, because the code importing the header/interface file actually needs the full definition. If the compiler supported some sort of intermediate format, then you could provide partially compiled templates, but pretty much all of the information would still have to be there (just in a less human readable format), and you can't even partially compile much of a template without the arguments to instantiate it with anyway. So, you'd pretty much just be putting the same template definition in a binary format instead of text, which wouldn't stop much of anyone from figuring out what they looked like. The reality of the matter is that if you want to hide your implementation, you don't use templates. It's impossible to actually hide them due to the fact that they're merely templates for generating code rather than actual code. - Jonathan M Davis
