Cyclic depency with class static ctor

[Jarrett Billingsley]

"Walter Bright" <newshound at digitalmars.com> wrote in message 
news:ei6795$2d76$1 at digitaldaemon.com...
> It can appear that way, but there is a crucial point about static 
> constructors. They are most useful when you import a module, and that 
> module *may* or *may not* have some initialization needs that are hidden 
> to you. Static constructors take care of that automatically.

That's true.  Though more times than not, I've run into the cyclic import 
problem..

> The problem here crops up only when they are cyclic imports, i.e. imports 
> that import each other. That means the programmer implementing N that 
> imports M is already familiar with the implementation of M, because M 
> imports N. Therefore, there is no unknown static constructor nor are there 
> any hooks that need to be added to main() by the programmer. Furthermore, 
> the programmer can implement the static constructors for M and N in such a 
> way that the user of M or N still does not need to add any hooks to 
> main(). Essentially, M and N are logically welded into one module for the 
> user.

It just seems like unnecessary cruft to have to do what Frank mentioned, 
i.e. to create a "static ctor module" which calls all the static 
initializations for all the modules in existence.  It seems like the 
compiler would be able to make a much better judgement call about which 
static ctors depended upon which modules, and would be able to issue a 
compile-time error if there really were a cyclic static ctor dependency 
(which, 99% of the time, there _isn't_, which is why it seems completely 
superfluous to have to manually initialize the modules!).

It makes me angry that I can't do something as simple as:

module a;
import b;

int x;

static this()
{
    x = 5;
}

...............

module b;
import a;

int y;

static this()
{
    y = 10;
}


There is obviously no interdependency between the modules for static 
initialization, but D throws an error at runtime nonetheless.  It seems 
almost stupid.