Gregor Richards wrote:
> Kirk McDonald wrote:
>> Bradley Smith wrote:
>>> Have you seen issue 492 (http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=492)?
>>>
>>
>> No, I hadn't. It's basically the same suggestion, only with using path seperators instead of dots. This might have the advantage of not running into any theoretical length limits on filenames. Still, being able to (sanely) dump object files into a flat directory is also nice.
>>
>> Either one of these would be good.
>>
> 
> Part of why I like my suggestion of using fully-qualified dot-names is how .a files work on UNIX. It's a directory-free archive. So you'll have foo.o and foo.o and foo.o :-P
> 
> Yes, it can work like this, but it makes extracting .a files a huge PITA.
> 
>  - Gregor Richards

(AFAIK, .lib files can't be extracted at all, so this doesn't translate to DMD/Windows at all)

 - Gregor Richards

Votes++ for either this or support for building object files to a mirror of the source tree. Both sound like good solutions to me. :)

just jeff wrote:
> Votes++ for either this or support for building object files to a mirror of the source tree. Both sound like good solutions to me. :)

There's a problem with mirroring the source tree. In effect, this is what combining -op and -od does now. The problem is: What if you have source files from outside your own project's directory? What if you have to go all the way to the root before finding a directory that they have in common? There's no particularly sensible way to solve this. Basing object file names on the module names, rather than however the source files are organized, is the only solution I can think of.

-- 
Kirk McDonald
Pyd: Wrapping Python with D
http://pyd.dsource.org

Yes please!
I've spent the last week sending mail back and forth with some poor soul who was trying to use my Luigi GUI lib, but couldn't seem to link it for some reason.

Finally today I tracked it down to the only difference between my working build file and his not working one being his use of the -od flag.  I didn't know what -od was for, but after figuring it out, I remembered this thread.  -od flag and .obj files were silently being overwritten with other obj files of the same name.

EVIL!

Isn't Kirk's proposal also the way Java compilers do it?  I seem to recall a bunch of foo.bar.baz.class files appearing last time I played with Java.

--bb

Kirk McDonald wrote:
> I originally heard this idea proposed by Gregor Richards in #d, and I
> think it should become DMD's default behavior. If it is not the default behavior, then it should at least be available as an option.
> 
> Perhaps my biggest grievance with both the DMD and GDC compilers is
> their handling of object files. DMD's default behavior is to dump all
> object files into the current directory. If the -od option is specified,
> the object files will be placed into the specified directory instead. If
> -op is specified, the object files are placed alongside the original source files.
> 
> The default behavior and using -od on its own both fail if any two source files in the project have the same name, even if they are in different packages. Using -op by itself is unappealing for two reasons:
> 
> 1) It is not unreasonable to expect a system to place libraries in directories to which the user does not have write access. Placing object files alongside the source files would therefore fail.
> 
> 2) It pollutes the source directories with object files. I much prefer keeping my object files somewhere to the side, in a designated "build" directory. This makes keeping projects in version control much easier, as I can simply exclude the one directory to keep object files out of version control.
> 
> Specifying both -op and -od causes things to get a little more interesting. Take the following:
> 
> test.d
> testpkg
>   test.d
> 
> // test.d
> module test;
> import testpkg.test : foo;
> void main() {
>     foo();
> }
> 
> // testpkg/test.d
> module testpkg.test;
> import std.stdio : writefln;
> void foo() { writefln("foo"); }
> 
> If we compile with this:
> 
> $ dmd test.d testpkg/test.d -op -odbuild
> 
> The "build" directory has the following structure:
> 
> build
>   test.obj
>   testpkg
>     test.obj
> 
> This is all and well. However, if we compile like this:
> 
> $ dmd test.d /path/to/testpkg/test.d -op -odbuild
> 
> Then DMD doesn't know what to do, and it places testpkg/test.obj alongside the source file. (More specifically, the full path is "joined" to the path specified by -od, which works out to just being the full path.)
> 
> This ambiguity can be disposed of if an object file's name is its fully-qualified module name. If this were true, then we could just say
> 
> $ dmd test.d testpkg/test.d -odbuild
> 
> and the result would be the build directory looking like this:
> 
> build
>   test.obj
>   testpkg.test.obj
> 
> I find this very clean and simple. Since the compiler fails anyway if two modules have the same name, there should not ever be overlaps in object file names with this scheme. The -op option could probably be safely deprecated.
> 
> As someone pointed out in #d, this would fail on NTFS if the module's fully-qualified name exceeds 255 characters. Though I cannot recall ever using a module whose name even approached that limit, this should be solved in most cases by truncating the filename at the start. (Hopefully, the last 255 characters are unique.) If the object file would fail to be unique even then, it can probably be safely declared the coder's fault for using a stupid naming scheme.
> 

Bill Baxter wrote:
>
> Isn't Kirk's proposal also the way Java compilers do it?  I seem to recall a bunch of foo.bar.baz.class files appearing last time I played with Java.

Java uses directories. It would be foo/bar/baz.class.

Bradley Smith wrote:
> Bill Baxter wrote:
>  >
>> Isn't Kirk's proposal also the way Java compilers do it?  I seem to recall a bunch of foo.bar.baz.class files appearing last time I played with Java.
> 
> Java uses directories. It would be foo/bar/baz.class.

What does it do with inner classes then?  Maybe that's what I was thinking of.

--bb

Bill Baxter wrote:
> Bradley Smith wrote:
>> Bill Baxter wrote:
>>  >
>>> Isn't Kirk's proposal also the way Java compilers do it?  I seem to recall a bunch of foo.bar.baz.class files appearing last time I played with Java.
>>
>> Java uses directories. It would be foo/bar/baz.class.
> 
> What does it do with inner classes then?  Maybe that's what I was thinking of.

Something like foo/bar/baz$inner.class.