[Vala] Name Mangling

[James Cox <jamescox84 googlemail com>]

Hi Everyone,
Has this been discussed before, or even fixed.  It's to do with the
way Vala handles the mangling of the names of various symbols, and how
these rule can create identical names in the C source code.  I propose
that the Vala compile issues a informative error when such conflicts
arise.

I've been using Vala for a while now.  I've got to say it's absolutely
an amazing idea, to use the C+GObject type system as the runtime
environment for a language is ingenious!  One thing I noticed though
(I appreciate this would be down to some bad design on the
programmer's (user'ss) part) is the way Vala mangles the names of
classes, methods.  It is possible to compile code to the intermediate
C and then have that code fail when the code is compiled by cc due to
redefinition of symbols, that had distinct names in the Vala source
file, but now have the same name in the C source files.  Here are some
examples:

namespace MyNameSpace
{
    class MyClass
    {
    }

    // Matches Mangleing of MyNameSpace.MyClass
    class my_class
    {
    }
}

// Matches Mangleing of MyNameSpace.MyClass
class MyNameSpaceMyClass
{
}

// Redefines the MyNameSpace.MyClass constructor due to matchingh magling.
public void my_name_space_myclass_new()
{
}

I'm not sure of the best way to solve the issues.  Maybe not
guaranteeing the name of a function that is  declared out side of a
class/namespace, an error when mangling matches another symbol.  Maybe
enforce a naming convention for class names, much in the same way as
Ruby...  Personally I think that keeping the same rules for name
mangling is best (keeps API looking like a normal GObject API), but
just make Vala issue a compile time error explaining that a
redefinition has be made and point the programmer to the two (or more)
location where it happened.  I'm not sure about where an when these
problems might arise in normal use, but I think the behavior of the
language should be specified for when these problems occur.