extern(C) names are being mangled; that's crazy, Walter says I'm crazy

[Patrick Schluter]

On Friday, 26 July 2019 at 12:55:10 UTC, Patrick Schluter wrote:
> On Wednesday, 24 July 2019 at 23:05:33 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> On 7/24/2019 2:24 PM, Manu wrote:
>>> In that callback case, they're effectively anonymously named
>>> functions...
>>
>> Yet they are given a name, and extern(C) to get the right 
>> calling convention.
>
> I think the issue here is one of definitions and I think I 
> understand why Walter and Manu do not understand each others 
> point.
>
> For Manu  extern(?) is mostly about mangling and secondarily 
> about calling convention.
> For Walter, its first and foremost about calling convention. 
> The mangling being unimportant as it can be explicitly set with 
> mangle.
>
> When looking at what the specs says [1] it's clear that extern 
> is more about calling conventions than mangling
>
> [1]: https://dlang.org/spec/attribute.html#linkage

To clarify. The issue here is that extern(?) is one keyword 
acting on 2 different things that are only loosely linked: the 
calling convention and the naming convention. What the different 
versions (C, C++, D, Windows, System, Objective-C) actually 
really do is very sketchy and not well defined and can even 
change from platform to platform (C++ mangles differently on 
Windows and Linux afaik).