C style 'static' functions

[Johannes Pfau via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Wednesday, 19 July 2017 at 15:28:50 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer 
wrote:
> On 7/19/17 8:16 AM, Petar Kirov [ZombineDev] wrote:
>> On Wednesday, 19 July 2017 at 12:11:38 UTC, John Burton wrote:
>>> On Wednesday, 19 July 2017 at 12:05:09 UTC, Kagamin wrote:
>>>> Try a newer compiler, this was fixed recently.
>>>
>>> Hmm it turns out this machine has 2.0.65 on which is fairly 
>>> ancient. I'd not realized this machine had not been updated.
>>>
>>> Sorry for wasting everyones' time if that's so, and thanks 
>>> for the help.
>> 
>> Just for the record, private is the analog of C's static. All 
>> private free and member functions are callable only from the 
>> module they are defined in. This is in contrast with C++, 
>> Java, C# where private members are visible only the class they 
>> are defined in.
>
> I'm not so sure of that. Private functions still generate 
> symbols. I think in C, there is no symbol (at least in the 
> object file) for static functions or variables.
>
> You could still call a private function in a D module via the 
> mangled name I believe.
>
> -Steve
>
> Note: not 100% sure of all this, but this is always the way 
> I've looked at it.

That's correct. We unfortunately can't do certain optimizations 
because of this (executable size related: removing unused or 
inlined only functions, ...).

The reason we can't make private functions object local are 
templates. A public template can access private functions, but 
the template instance may be emitted to another object. And as 
templates can't be checzked speculatively we don't even know if 
there's a template accessing a private function.

Dlls on Windows face a similar problem. Once we get the export 
templates proposed in earlier Dll discussions we can make 
non-exported, private functions object local.