On 29-Oct-12 01:38, David Nadlinger wrote:
On Sunday, 28 October 2012 at 20:59:25 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
It baffles me that programmers would find "undefined symbol" hard to
make sense of.
Do really think that your typical Java programmer is familiar with the
term »symbol« in the compiler/linker sense? Also, don't underestimate
the perceived scariness/ugliness of mangled names in linker error
messages. I'm pretty much fluent in reading D mangled names by now, but
most newcomers definitely aren't.
So true.
That, coupled with the absence of the typical source location
information (IDE integration!), is probably enough to make encountering
such errors a significantly more unpleasant experience for most people
than compiler errors.
Again, maybe not for you, maybe not for me, but I think it is clear that
this is a problem to some, so the discussion should not be about talking
the problem away, but rather about evaluating possible
solutions/mitigation strategies in terms of feasibility (e.g. name
demangling in linker output?).
Indeed, when dmd works as a driver and invokes a linker can't it just
pipe its output through ddemangle?
--
Dmitry Olshansky
