Is Anything Holding you back?

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d]

On Wednesday, 7 October 2015 at 10:03:11 UTC, Johannes Pfau wrote:
> Am Wed, 07 Oct 2015 08:41:30 +0000
> schrieb Jonathan M Davis <jmdavisProg at gmx.com>:
>
>> On Wednesday, 7 October 2015 at 07:08:39 UTC, extrawurst wrote:
>> > Method 1: Adding a static c'tor to every module does not 
>> > work very long in practice (as experienced first handed) 
>> > cause you are in "cyclic c'tor hell" very quick...
>> 
>> The cyclic dependency checking in druntime makes static 
>> constructors almost unusable. It's a case of being protected 
>> so much while trying to do something that you can't do what 
>> you're trying to do. There really should be some way IMHO to 
>> have something similar to @trusted where you tell the 
>> compiler/runtime that the order does not matter for a 
>> particular static constructor and that it should just trust 
>> the programmer on that, but Walter rejected the idea when it 
>> was brought up.
>> 
>> - Jonathan M Davis
>
> With LDC you can abuse the C constructor mechanism to do that. 
> GDC does not yet expose C constructors to D code but it's on my 
> list and it's easy to implement.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by C constructors, so I don't 
know how that works, but unless it's in all of the compilers, I 
don't think that it's really worth much ultimately. And we _do_ 
have workarounds already. std.stdio is an example of one such 
module where what is essentially its static constructor is called 
by another module in order to break the cycle. But then you lose 
out on the special benefits of static constructors with regards 
to initializing stuff like immutable objects, which can be a 
problem - particularly when stuff like pure gets involved.

Honestly, I think that if we don't want it to be considered 
borderline bad practice to use static constructors, I think that 
we need a solution for this that allows them to function normally 
without being concerned about circular dependencies (at least 
when the programmer marks them as such). And if the C constructor 
mechanism that you're talking about somehow does that, then 
great, but it needs to be standard D, or it's a pretty limited 
solution.

- Jonathan M Davis