Doug Gregor, from Apple, presented on adding modules to C at the 2012 LLVM Developer’s Meeting. Fascinating approach. C has been around a long time and needs some love to help manage the complex needs of software these days.
Alas, this is not the same thing as namespaces. This is about grouping library code together and declaring relationships between them so that the compiler can more quickly decide what it needs to build. I like the idea, but from a developer’s perspective working with Apple’s frameworks, a modern namespacing mechanism is higher up my priority list.
NSNamespacesToEfficientlyHandleCollisionsOfAGrowingNumberOfComponentsNotFound
Also, John Siracusa quipps: “C is like Apple’s bad boyfriend. ‘I can change him!’”
Update Fri December 07, 2012
Looks like they published a video of the presentation. Might want to check it out if the slides seemed too dense.
✦ PermalinkMy books...