Hi,

I recently discovered that D support file interface .di, but through my past reads I never seen someone using it. The std don't do usage of it (compile time issue maybe ?) and most of D project are in the same case.

Is this feature depreceated ?

I'm from a C++ background, I agree on the fact that keeping declarations and implementaions sync across two files is tedious, but when I have to read code, I like a clean interface to summarize the thing.

Dmd doc is there to replace the need of an clean interface ?

On 18/04/2012 09:18, "Erèbe" wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I recently discovered that D support file interface .di, but through my
> past reads I never seen someone using it. The std don't do usage of it
> (compile time issue maybe ?) and most of D project are in the same case.
>
> Is this feature depreceated ?
>
> I'm from a C++ background, I agree on the fact that keeping declarations
> and implementaions sync across two files is tedious, but when I have to
> read code, I like a clean interface to summarize the thing.
>
> Dmd doc is there to replace the need of an clean interface ?

You can find a list of deprecated features here:

http://dlang.org/deprecate

.di files are not deprecated, just rarely used. This is for a few reasons:
 * There is no requirement to use them
 * They severely limit the capabilities of CTFE (http://dlang.org/function#interpretation)
 * DMD is really fast - the speed gain from using .di files isn't noticeable for a lot of projects
 * If you want them, they're very easy to generate yourself (use the -Dd and -Df compiler switches)
 * For the purposes of reading APIs, DDoc is normally used - alternatively, all good editors and IDEs provide code folding to hide implementations


-- 
Robert
http://octarineparrot.com/

On Wednesday, 18 April 2012 at 10:02:49 UTC, Robert Clipsham wrote:
> On 18/04/2012 09:18, "Erèbe" wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I recently discovered that D support file interface .di, but through my
>> past reads I never seen someone using it. The std don't do usage of it
>> (compile time issue maybe ?) and most of D project are in the same case.
>>
>> Is this feature depreceated ?
>>
>> I'm from a C++ background, I agree on the fact that keeping declarations
>> and implementaions sync across two files is tedious, but when I have to
>> read code, I like a clean interface to summarize the thing.
>>
>> Dmd doc is there to replace the need of an clean interface ?
>
> You can find a list of deprecated features here:
>
> http://dlang.org/deprecate
>
> .di files are not deprecated, just rarely used. This is for a few reasons:
>  * There is no requirement to use them
>  * They severely limit the capabilities of CTFE (http://dlang.org/function#interpretation)
>  * DMD is really fast - the speed gain from using .di files isn't noticeable for a lot of projects
>  * If you want them, they're very easy to generate yourself (use the -Dd and -Df compiler switches)
>  * For the purposes of reading APIs, DDoc is normally used - alternatively, all good editors and IDEs provide code folding to hide implementations

Thanks, CTFE  is a good argument for me

On Wed, 18 Apr 2012 03:02:49 -0700, Robert Clipsham <robert@octarineparrot.com> wrote:

> On 18/04/2012 09:18, "Erèbe" wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I recently discovered that D support file interface .di, but through my
>> past reads I never seen someone using it. The std don't do usage of it
>> (compile time issue maybe ?) and most of D project are in the same case.
>>
>> Is this feature depreceated ?
>>
>> I'm from a C++ background, I agree on the fact that keeping declarations
>> and implementaions sync across two files is tedious, but when I have to
>> read code, I like a clean interface to summarize the thing.
>>
>> Dmd doc is there to replace the need of an clean interface ?
>
> You can find a list of deprecated features here:
>
> http://dlang.org/deprecate
>
> .di files are not deprecated, just rarely used. This is for a few reasons:
>   * There is no requirement to use them
>   * They severely limit the capabilities of CTFE (http://dlang.org/function#interpretation)
>   * DMD is really fast - the speed gain from using .di files isn't noticeable for a lot of projects
>   * If you want them, they're very easy to generate yourself (use the -Dd and -Df compiler switches)
>   * For the purposes of reading APIs, DDoc is normally used - alternatively, all good editors and IDEs provide code folding to hide implementations
>

Where DI files come in handy is for commercial libraries that don't want to hand out their source, without DI's that's impossible, therefore for D to be a commercially acceptable language, DI's must work, unfortunately, DI's do not auto-generate to the this requirement right now, I have a patch to fix that. But if you are OSS, you don't really care, just deliver the source as the "library".

-- 
Adam Wilson
IRC: LightBender
Project Coordinator
The Horizon Project
http://www.thehorizonproject.org/

On Tuesday, 24 April 2012 at 01:51:54 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote:
> Where DI files come in handy is for commercial libraries that don't want to hand out their source, without DI's that's impossible, therefore for D to be a commercially acceptable language, DI's must work, unfortunately, DI's do not auto-generate to the this requirement right now, I have a patch to fix that. But if you are OSS, you don't really care, just deliver the source as the "library".

DI files are sufficiently auto generated now. Templated functions have to be part of the source code because, well, *they're templates* the compiler needs the source code. Otherwise .di files are just .d files with a different name, you can do forward declarations for defining the interface with a library, I've used it several times.

There is a build tool that will generate the interface files and use those when actually compiling in order to speed up compilation times when doing incremental compilation (don't have to parse as much code).

--
James Miller

On Tuesday, 24 April 2012 at 01:51:54 UTC, Adam Wilson wrote:
> On Wed, 18 Apr 2012 03:02:49 -0700, Robert Clipsham <robert@octarineparrot.com> wrote:
>
>> On 18/04/2012 09:18, "Erèbe" wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I recently discovered that D support file interface .di, but through my
>>> past reads I never seen someone using it. The std don't do usage of it
>>> (compile time issue maybe ?) and most of D project are in the same case.
>>>
>>> Is this feature depreceated ?
>>>
>>> I'm from a C++ background, I agree on the fact that keeping declarations
>>> and implementaions sync across two files is tedious, but when I have to
>>> read code, I like a clean interface to summarize the thing.
>>>
>>> Dmd doc is there to replace the need of an clean interface ?
>>
>> You can find a list of deprecated features here:
>>
>> http://dlang.org/deprecate
>>
>> .di files are not deprecated, just rarely used. This is for a few reasons:
>>  * There is no requirement to use them
>>  * They severely limit the capabilities of CTFE (http://dlang.org/function#interpretation)
>>  * DMD is really fast - the speed gain from using .di files isn't noticeable for a lot of projects
>>  * If you want them, they're very easy to generate yourself (use the -Dd and -Df compiler switches)
>>  * For the purposes of reading APIs, DDoc is normally used - alternatively, all good editors and IDEs provide code folding to hide implementations
>>
>
> Where DI files come in handy is for commercial libraries that don't want to hand out their source, without DI's that's impossible, therefore for D to be a commercially acceptable language, DI's must work, unfortunately, DI's do not auto-generate to the this requirement right now, I have a patch to fix that. But if you are OSS, you don't really care, just deliver the source as the "library".

D could see use an approach similar to what Delphi does, where the tooling is able to extract the information from the .tpu files (delphi libraries), as far as I can remember. Go has a similar approach where the package information is stored in a special section in the library/object files.

But I guess di files are anyway easier to maintain.