Problem with coupling shared object symbol visibility with protection

[Andre via Digitalmars-d]

Hi,

I also want to say a big thank you to all of you involved
in this topic and especially to Benjamin.

Proper DLL handling in D I would really appreciate.
I think this topic is the break through.

Kind regards
André

On Tuesday, 17 February 2015 at 18:03:06 UTC, Benjamin Thaut 
wrote:
> So i looked at the Dll Test within the dmd test framework and 
> when I make export an attribute, like I suggested, this 
> perticular test will compile & run without any code changes. 
> This is another reason why I suspect that making export an 
> attribute will only break very little if any code at all.
>
> Am 16.02.2015 um 09:08 schrieb Walter Bright:
>>
>> At this point I suggest simply making those private helper 
>> functions
>> public and export them. It gets your project moving without 
>> waiting for
>> language changes (and this is a breaking change).
>>
>
> I have to big fears with doing this
>
> 1) I finish everything up any finally do the pull request. Then 
> the reviewers will realize that using export in all required 
> places will completely undermine D's module level protection 
> system and reject the PR. Then all my work is in vain.
>
> 2) Even if 1 does not happen, that means from now on the broken 
> export will be used in _actual_ code. Because it kind of works. 
> Going forward this would mean that changing export into an 
> attribute will break actual production code. So in my opinion 
> we have to implement Dll Support on windows and fix export 
> simulatiously, otherwise fixing export will lead to big 
> breaking changes instead of a few small ones.
>
> Kind Regards
> Benjamin Thaut