Re: [Vala] vala code generation too constrained?

[Xavier Bestel <xavier bestel free fr>]

On Tue, 2011-01-11 at 11:07 +0100, pancake wrote:
> On 01/11/11 10:48, Xavier Bestel wrote:
> > You totally misunderstood him, pancake :)
> oops
> > By "old timers" he means "people with a long experience of C".
> weird concept

Typical English expression, AFAIK.

> > And what's he's talking about, is Vala's way of mangling names to be
> > usable in C, which can make some names that are different in Vala
> > conflict once translated to C. That behavior is useful when you're
> > coding a library (you want your lin usable from C), but not when you're
> > building an application.
> I didn't read any "mangling" word in his mail, and I don't think this is
> a feature for Vala.. but ok, maybe i'm an "old timer".
> > So he's asking for a switch to change name mangling, so that "My.Class"
> > and "My_class" have different names in the generated code. I tend to
> > agree with him.
> I think that enforcing decent name constrains is good, not only for
> C compatiblity.. but also to force the developer to look for readable
> and coherent names for its code.
>
> This "feature" will help to new users or people who don't want to know
> what C is, or just see Vala as a completely unlinked language to C, which
> is not the case.

Say what you want, I see it as a purely technical limitation, which does
more harm than good. There can be much head-scratching, trying to
understand why there's a bug in the program while it's just a
non-obvious mangling problem.

> The 'name mangling' magic you are asking for will force all name symbol
> generation to append a random number or prefix everything with the
> file name.. this will keep C compatiblity but making readability harder.

That's an implementation detail. You could always use traditional name
mangling (so nothing changes), and start adding a suffix/prefix only in
case of conflict, so you keep the best of both worlds.

> I don't think that adding language features by breaking C compatiblity
> can benefit Vala.. in the mean that if some day this flag appears, i will
> prefer to have it only to fix name collision issues, not breaking feature
> list between the two modes.

IMHO there should be 2 modes:
- library mode, where conflicts are clearly and loudly shown by valac.
- application mode, where conflicts are silently resolved via a suffix
  or whatever clever magic some smart people invent.

        Xav