Proposed improvements to the separate compilation model

[Vladimir Panteleev]

On Sat, 23 Jul 2011 17:16:28 +0300, Andrei Alexandrescu  
<SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote:

> On 7/23/11 12:19 AM, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
>> On Sat, 23 Jul 2011 05:52:12 +0300, Andrei Alexandrescu
>> <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote:
>>
>>> I don't think it's an either-or situation. For a variety of reasons,
>>> some organizations want separate control of the "declaration" and
>>> "definition" files. Inability to do so is a common criticism leveled
>>> against Java and one of the reasons for the proliferation of XML
>>> configuration files and dynamic loading in that language.
>>
>> Now I'm curious, what are those reasons? Can we improve .di generation
>> to accommodate everyone, even if we'd need to add attributes or pragmas
>> to the language or frontend?
>>
>> It just seems to me like this path kills two birds with one stone, and
>> is less work overall than doing both.
>
> Improving .di generation is great. Large projects may have policies that  
> restrict changing interface files so as to not trigger recompilation  
> without necessity. Such policies are difficult to accommodate with .di  
> files that are generated automatically.

So don't change a generated .di file's mtime if the contents is identical  
to the existing version on disk.

-- 
Best regards,
  Vladimir                            mailto:vladimir at thecybershadow.net