Graham St Jack wrote:
On 23/03/11 15:12, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
"Graham St Jack"<graham.stj...@internode.on.net> wrote in message
news:imbai9$2jb9$1...@digitalmars.com...
My own solution to this "problem" is to never have circular imports at
all. The build system I use prohibits them, so any careless introduction
of a circularity is spotted immediately and I refactor the code to
eliminate the circularity. I have never come across a valid need for
circularities, and have never had any trouble eliminating any that creep
in.
Avoiding circularities has plenty of advantages, like progressive
development, testing and integration. On bigger projects these
advantages
are very important, and even on small ones they are useful.
That's certainly good in many cases, but I find there are many times
when a
"one-way" dependency graph just doesn't fit the given problem and causes
more trouble than it solves. You often end up needing to re-invent the
wheel
to avoid a dependency, or split/arrange/merge modules in confusing
unintuitive ways that have more to do with implementation detail than
high-level purpose.
I'm happy to admit that these cases could come up, but I have never yet
seen one where the design wasn't improved by removing the circularity.
I wish Phobos didn't have any circular dependencies. Unfortunately,
there are almost no modules which aren't in a loop (Basically, anything
which imports std.range is a lost cause). There is no doubt that it
hurts debugging.
