Library standardization

[Hans W. Uhlig]

Chris R. Miller wrote:
> e-t172 Wrote:
> 
>> Janice Caron a écrit :
>>> OK, so you're basically saying you want D to have header files, like
>>> C. Fair enough. The prospect doesn't thrill me, but I would be
>>> intrigued to know how other many people want this.
>> Right now, probably not so much. However, when D gets really popular and 
>> people begin to use really big projects (several tens of megabytes of 
>> code), they will be very annoyed if they don't have header files. And 
>> everyone will be annoyed: the library writers, the users, and the 
>> distributions that package the library.
> 
> I don't think so.  As a counterargument, Java doesn't have header files, and there are projects of epic proportions in Java.  Just the JDK is 2,033,027 lines of code in 7,069 files over 480 directories(1).  Java is also, for better or for worse, a model language as far as stability and language is concerned.  Java doesn't have header files, and Java does just fine.  I - personally - can't find a reason to use header files in D.
> 
> 1) I should know.  http://www.fsdev.net/wiki/source-scope
> 
The reason for this as mentioned else ware is D uses "relatively" 
standard object files.

Java .class files have all the necessary meta data inside the object 
file, and linking, inlining is done all at runtime.