On Thu, 01 Jul 2010 23:03:31 -0400, Justin Spahr-Summers
<[email protected]> wrote:
On Thu, 1 Jul 2010 19:34:09 -0700, Jonathan M Davis
<[email protected]> wrote:
On Thursday, July 01, 2010 19:13:02 Rainer Deyke wrote:
> On 7/1/2010 19:32, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> > By the way, why _does_ D mangle its names? What's the advantage? I
> > understood that C++ does it because it was forced to back in the
days
> > when it was transformed into C code during compilation but that
it's now
> > generally considered a legacy problem that we're stuck with rather
than
> > something that would still be considered a good design decision.
> >
> > So, why did D go with name mangling? It certainly makes stuff like
stack
> > traces harder to deal with. I've never heard of any advantage to
name
> > mangling, only disadvantages.
>
> Because DMD is stuck with a C-age linker.
Well, I guess that it just goes to show how little I understand about
exactly
how linking works when I don't understand what that means. After all, C
doesn't
using name mangling. Does that mean that name mangling it meant as a
namespacing
tool to ensure that no D function could possibly have the same linking
name as a
C function?
- Jonathan M Davis
C doesn't require mangling because functions can't be overloaded. To
make D (or C++) compatible with C linkers, symbol names need to be
unique, so functions with identical names but different types need to be
represented with different symbols.
This isn't really the reason for "mangling". The issue is that the C
linker requires symbols to be the same as source symbols. That is, made
up only of A-Z,a-z,0-9 and _. I'd much rather see symbol names like this:
foo(int,string)
than
fooIvS45whatever
-Steve
