Re: Why free and realloc seem to include .

[Temtaime via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Thursday, 3 August 2017 at 14:03:56 UTC, Michael wrote:

So this might be a bit of a stupid question, but looking at the DMD source code (dmodule.d in particular) I see the following code:

if (srcfile._ref == 0)
   .free(srcfile.buffer);
srcfile.buffer = null;
srcfile.len = 0;

and I was just wondering why certain functions seem to be called using the dot operator on its own, unattached to some object. This is probably a naive question but I haven't seen this in my limited experience using D and I was just wondering why this is. I have only really seen this relating to D's manual memory management. But in the same file, I see examples like this:

FileName.free(n);

so what is the case when you should use .free() and why not just free()? Thanks.

Dot is equal to C++'s :: operator to access a global namespace.
Aka ::free(ptr);