On Monday, 10 February 2014 at 22:42:30 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
wrote:
And on top of that, as has come a number of times previously
when this sort of
thing has been discussed, Phobos was not designed with the idea
that you would
import entire packages at once, and it could cause some
entertaining symbol
conflicts, which people would then complain about if we tried
to support
importing Phobos packages in general. Also, even if there
weren't any
conflicts now, we'd have to worry about additional conflicts
every time that
we added a symbol to Phobos. At the extreme, if std had a
package.d file that
imported _everything_ so that you could just import std; and
have all of
Phobos, then adding any symbol to any module in all of Phobos
where there was
another symbol with that same name in another, unrelated module
would then
break existing code.
I absolutely hate getting symbol conflicts when importing
multiple Phobos modules, but I don't think importing an entire
package as a module is all that unreasonable. That's basically
what we're doing right now, as Phobos is so flat. Your example of
importing all of std is a bit extreme, but if we can't even
support reasonable cases, then either D's module system, its
design, or both have failed in this regard. One of the worst
things about the module system currently is the private symbol
conflicts, and fixing that would go a long way to allowing some
real modularity in Phobos, as well as splitting up the different
packages and factoring out any common functionality into
privately-imported modules.
