Identifier (...) is too long by X characters

[Don Clugston]

Sean Kelly wrote:
> Don Clugston wrote:
>> Sean Kelly wrote:
>>> Chris Nicholson-Sauls wrote:
>>>> Tom S wrote:
>>>>> ...DMD eats many many rams...
>>>>
>>>> *Gasp!*  Those poor sheep/goats!
>>>>
>>>> I would be interested in seeing exactly what your 'Input' mixin 
>>>> does.  The use of self-referancing returns to initialize it is 
>>>> pretty nifty though.  Might be a way to get rid of the '.end' at the 
>>>> end, though?
>>>>
>>>> The error baffles me, though.
>>>
>>> Symbols are limited to ~255 chars on Win32.  I think it's a 
>>> limitation of the object file format.  "symbol too long" errors are 
>>> painfully common in C++, though they're typically truncated to the 
>>> max length to allow for debugging.
>>
>> I thought the OMF lib-imposed limit was about 4K. I've just made a 
>> template with a symbol name of 480 characters, and that was OK.
> 
> Perhaps it is--it's been a while since I developed on Windows.  I only 
> remember seeing the errors quite often.
> 
>> Maybe in the future, we'll be able to add some kind of 'final' 
>> declaration to templates, which would indicate that they don't need to 
>> be stored in the object file or library, and can be discarded from the 
>> symbol table as soon as they are instantiated. This would be 
>> particularly useful for recursive templates, which can easily spew 
>> reams of garbage into the object file.
> 
> This would be nice.  I generally expect this to occur anyway, but it 
> would be nice to have some sort of insurance.

It definitely happens, but I don't understand why they're in the obj at 
all (if I understand correctly, it has to happen that way in C++ because 
it's possible for a seperate obj file to provide a specialisation; but 
that's not an issue for D).

It's a real problem for the use of metaprogramming with DDL. The .objs 
can a be a megabyte in size, but contribute only a hundred bytes to the 
final exe. It would make linking much faster if it didn't happen, and it 
would probably improve compilation time.