C style 'static' functions

[Johannes Pfau via Digitalmars-d-learn]

Am Wed, 19 Jul 2017 19:18:03 +0000
schrieb Petar Kirov [ZombineDev] <petar.p.kirov at gmail.com>:

> On Wednesday, 19 July 2017 at 18:49:32 UTC, Johannes Pfau wrote:
> >
> > Can you explain why _object-level visibility_ would matter in 
> > this case?  
> 
> (I'm sure you have more experience with shared libraries than me, 
> so correct me if I'm wrong)
> 
> We can't do attribute inference for exported functions because 
> changing the function body may easily change the function 
> signature (-> name mangling) and break clients of the (shared) 
> library. Therefore, it follows that attribute inference can only 
> be done for non-exported functions.

OK, I didn't think of the stable ABI argument, that indeed does make
sense. Leads to the strange consequence though that private functions
called from templates need to be exported and therefore can't use
inference.

OT: if a function private function is exported and called from a public
template things are difficult either way. Such a function needs to be
considered to be 'logically' public: As the template code instantiated
in another library will not get updated when you update the library
with the private function, you also have to ensure that the program
logic is still valid when mixing a new implementation of the private
function and an old implementation of the template function....

-- Johannes