Type safety could prevent nuclear war

[Adam D. Ruppe via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 5 February 2016 at 01:33:14 UTC, tsbockman wrote:
> As to the ".di" stuff - I've not used them. Care to educate me? 
> How can they cause similar problems?

Well, technically, a .di file is just a .d file renamed, but it 
tends to have the bodies stripped out. Separate compliation is a 
supported feature of D.

The way you'd do it is something like this:

struct Foo {
    float a;
    float b;
}

void bar(Foo* f) {
    f.b = whatever;
}


Then compile it with -lib and make a "header" file manually:

struct Foo {
    double a;
    double b;
}
void bar(Foo*);


You can now create D modules that import this and link against 
the compiled library. Very similar to C's model...

But I redefined Foo! The name mangling won't catch this. bar will 
be mangled to take `Foo` as an argument and the linker will catch 
if we change that, but it doesn't know what Foo actually is.

By changing that, we introduce the problem.

> 314 definitely has potential. Should we start an "Underhanded 
> D" contest? Sounds like bad marketing, but a lot of fun :-P

it might be :)