On Monday, May 15, 2017 21:52:27 Nordlöw via Digitalmars-d-learn wrote: > Why isn't there a function, say `tempFile()`, in > > https://dlang.org/phobos/std_file.html > > that creates a temporary _file_ when we already have > > https://dlang.org/phobos/std_file.html#tempDir
We have std.stdio.File.tmpfile, which is kind of terrible, because you can't get at its name, and it gets deleted as soon as the File is destroyed. And we briefly had std.stdio.File.scratchFile (IIRC someone didn't like tempFile for one reason or another, which is what I had named it originally), but it pulled in enough dependencies (IIRC, beacuse it used tempDir, which is in std.file, std.datetime got pulled in, because other stuff in std.file uses SysTime, and std.datetime pulled in yet more...) that hello world grew considerably in size (since it uses std.stdio and File for writeln), and there was enough screaming about that that the function was removed. I don't remember what the proposal was for what we needed to do to fix having a bunch of Phobos pulled in to make scratchFile work, but until that's been sorted out, we're kind of stuck, as stupid as that is: https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14599 Personally, I think that it would be very much worth making hello world larger, since hello world really doesn't matter, but because there are plenty of folks checking out D who write hello world and then look at the executable size, it was considered unacceptable for it to get much larger. Now, we _could_ add a tempFile to std.file which returned a supposedly unique filename in tempDir, but simply using it would result in a race condition, because (as unlikely as it may be) someone else could create the file between the time that you get the file name from tempFile and the time when you try to open it to write to it - that's why using a solution that involves opening the file is needed. I suppose that we could add a tempFile that did what std.stdio.File.scratchFile did but create an empty file and return its path rather than returning a File, though that would be a bit annoying, since you'd then have to open it to operate on it instead of just writing to it. Maybe it would be worth doing though given the stupidity blocking std.stdio.File.scratchFile. - Jonathan M Davis
