To avoid some linking errors

David Nadlinger see at klickverbot.at
Sun Oct 28 14:38:58 PDT 2012


On Sunday, 28 October 2012 at 20:59:25 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> It baffles me that programmers would find "undefined symbol" 
> hard to make sense of.

Do really think that your typical Java programmer is familiar 
with the term »symbol« in the compiler/linker sense? Also, 
don't underestimate the perceived scariness/ugliness of mangled 
names in linker error messages. I'm pretty much fluent in reading 
D mangled names by now, but most newcomers definitely aren't.

That, coupled with the absence of the typical source location 
information (IDE integration!), is probably enough to make 
encountering such errors a significantly more unpleasant 
experience for most people than compiler errors.

Again, maybe not for you, maybe not for me, but I think it is 
clear that this is a problem to some, so the discussion should 
not be about talking the problem away, but rather about 
evaluating possible solutions/mitigation strategies in terms of 
feasibility (e.g. name demangling in linker output?).

David


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