visibility vs. accessibility of protected symbols

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Tuesday, February 14, 2012 00:36:31 Timon Gehr wrote:
> On 02/14/2012 12:26 AM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> > On Tuesday, February 14, 2012 00:15:40 Martin Nowak wrote:
> >> Can you elaborate on what issues you see with NVI. After all it's only
> >> the final public
> >> method that needs to call the virtual private methods.
> > 
> > As I explain in that bug report, NVI can be acheived with protected
> > rather than private. So, we can do NVI now with private being
> > non-virtual. However, if we make private virtual, then the compiler can
> > no longer inline private functions in classes unless they're marked as
> > final. That's a performance hit to pretty much every class ever
> > written.
> > 
> > Yes, the conscientious programmer will mark their classes' private
> > functions final unless they intend to use them for NVI, but the
> > _default_ is then inefficient for little to no gain. All you gain is
> > the ability to do NVI with private instead of protected, and that is
> > not even vaguely worth the performance hit to almost every D class ever
> > IMHO.
> > 
> > - Jonathan M Davis
> 
> Virtual private does not allow for cross-module NVI, so what would be
> the point anyway?

Why wouldn't it? The whole point of NVI is that you override it but don't call 
it - the base class does that. So, the derived class could override the 
private function but couldn't call it. It _is_ a bit weird though, all the 
same.

Regardless, I'm against making private virtual because of the needless 
performance hit.

- Jonathan M Davis