[OT] Clang seems to implement modules

[Paulo Pinto]

On Sunday, 18 November 2012 at 21:21:12 UTC, Jonathan M Davis 
wrote:
> On Sunday, November 18, 2012 12:53:59 Walter Bright wrote:
>> There was a proposal to add modules to C++11, but it failed to 
>> gather much
>> interest.
>
> Honestly, it's the sort of thing that I would have thought 
> wouldn't even be
> possible in C++, because it would require too much of a 
> redesign and would
> break backwards compatibility. There a lot of things like that 
> in C++ which
> are completely unfixable without breaking backwards 
> compatibility, and if
> you're doing that, you might as well go all the way and create 
> a new language,
> since there are so many things that should be fixed/changed 
> that it wouldn't
> really be C++ anymore by the time that you were done (it would 
> probably be
> something much closer to D). It'll be interesting to see how 
> they actually
> implement a module feature.

I don't see what it would break, besides the pre-processor usage.

Modules mean that the compilers just need to read a symbol table
or an AST from an external file.

>
> Also, I think that so many C/C++ devs are so used to the 
> compile times that
> they get with them that it's nowhere near the top of the list 
> of features that
> they want. It probably didn't even occur to many of them.

This is why so many developers with C and C++ only experience 
think
Go compile times are great, when every developer outside C and C++
world has been having them for the last 30 years.

> Not to mention, if
> you think that fixing the problem isn't really even feasible 
> (and I have no
> idea how it's feasible as long as the pre-processor or textual 
> inclusion is
> involved), then it's definitely not going to be on the list of 
> things that
> you're asking for.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis

Easy, just do them the same way as Turbo Pascal/Delphi do it. If 
you
really need to change the pre-processor values, then you need to 
recompile the module anyway.

http://www.freepascal.org/docs-html/prog/progse1.html#progsu37.html

This is the same thing D requires, if the version() values 
change, right?

--
Paulo