On 12/06/12 11:07, timotheecour wrote:
There's a current pull request to improve di file generation
(https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dmd/pull/945); I'd like to
suggest further ideas.
As far as I understand, di interface files try to achieve these
conflicting goals:
1) speed up compilation by avoiding having to reparse large files over
and over.
2) hide implementation details for proprietary reasons
> 3) still maintain source code in some form to allow inlining and CTFE
> 4) be human readable
Is that actually true? My recollection is that the original motivation
was only goal (2), but I was fairly new to D at the time (2005).
Here's the original post where it was implemented:
http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/29883.html
and it got partially merged into DMD 0.141 (Dec 4 2005), first usable in
DMD0.142
Personally I believe that.di files are *totally* the wrong approach for
goal (1). I don't think goal (1) and (2) have anything in common at all
with each other, except that C tried to achieve both of them using
header files. It's an OK solution for (1) in C, it's a failure in C++,
and a complete failure in D.
IMHO: If we want goal (1), we should try to achieve goal (1), and stop
pretending its in any way related to goal (2).
