Friday, July 1, 2016

Why Swift Ditched Tuple-to-Tuple Function Modeling

Jordan Rose (via Jaden Geller):

The real blow, however, came with that very first idea: that we could treat methods with different argument labels as simple overloads in type. This led to poor diagnostics where the compiler couldn’t decide whether to believe the types or the argument labels, and might tell you you have the wrong argument labels rather than a type mismatch. For pretty much every Apple API, this was the wrong decision. On top of all that, it was really hard to refer to a method when you didn’t want to call it. (Most methods with the same base name still have unique labels, so you don’t need the types to disambiguate.)

So we introduced the notion of “full names”, which are the things you see written as move(from:to:) (and which are represented by DeclName in the compiler). Almost immediately diagnostics got better, testing optional protocol requirements got shorter, and a lot of compiler implementation got simpler.

[…]

And then we kind of got stuck here. We have full names used throughout the compiler, but tuple labels still appear in types. They’re still used in mangling.

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