mangle

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Thu, 01 Jul 2010 23:03:31 -0400, Justin Spahr-Summers  
<Justin.SpahrSummers at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, 1 Jul 2010 19:34:09 -0700, Jonathan M Davis
> <jmdavisprog at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Thursday, July 01, 2010 19:13:02 Rainer Deyke wrote:
>> > On 7/1/2010 19:32, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>> > > By the way, why _does_ D mangle its names? What's the advantage? I
>> > > understood that C++ does it because it was forced to back in the  
>> days
>> > > when it was transformed into C code during compilation but that  
>> it's now
>> > > generally considered a legacy problem that we're stuck with rather  
>> than
>> > > something that would still be considered a good design decision.
>> > >
>> > > So, why did D go with name mangling? It certainly makes stuff like  
>> stack
>> > > traces harder to deal with. I've never heard of any advantage to  
>> name
>> > > mangling, only disadvantages.
>> >
>> > Because DMD is stuck with a C-age linker.
>>
>> Well, I guess that it just goes to show how little I understand about  
>> exactly
>> how linking works when I don't understand what that means. After all, C  
>> doesn't
>> using name mangling. Does that mean that name mangling it meant as a  
>> namespacing
>> tool to ensure that no D function could possibly have the same linking  
>> name as a
>> C function?
>>
>> - Jonathan M Davis
>
> C doesn't require mangling because functions can't be overloaded. To
> make D (or C++) compatible with C linkers, symbol names need to be
> unique, so functions with identical names but different types need to be
> represented with different symbols.

This isn't really the reason for "mangling".  The issue is that the C  
linker requires symbols to be the same as source symbols.  That is, made  
up only of A-Z,a-z,0-9 and _.  I'd much rather see symbol names like this:

foo(int,string)

than

fooIvS45whatever

-Steve