Re: [Caml-list] Module aliases ideal name-spacing

[Goswin von Brederlow <goswin-v-b@web.de>]

On Mon, Dec 29, 2014 at 12:14:58AM +0000, Leo White wrote:
> > The only remaining remnant of the "prefixed"
> > namespace is in myLib.mli/.ml
> >
> >
> >     module MyModule = MyLibMyModule
> >     module Utils = MyLibUtils
> >
> > It would be nice to eliminate that as well, but I could imagine
> > auto-generating these module alias mappings.
> 
> It is certainly feasible to have the build system generate these
> mappings automatically. For example, I believe that Jane Street's
> example build rules for Jenga include support for generating these alias
> mappings (examples/js-build-style/jengaroot.ml in the Jenga source
> code).
> 
> > This
> > sounds like a nice workaround the namespace issue, but do you think it would be worth supporting module aliases
> > themselves as a form of namespacing at compilation time, so that this intermediate prefixed compilation artifact isn't
> > needed?
> 
> I'm aware of a few proposals, and I'm sure something more user-friendly
> will happen at some point, but the details of these proposals are tricky
> and important to get right. For now, the support in 4.02 is at least
> sufficient to have a working replacement for `-pack`.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Leo

Isn't this just an improvement on pack to reduce code size? As in
sources that only use MyLib.Util will only get MyLibUtil linked in but
not MyLibMyModule.

From a user standpoint a MyLib pack or the MyLib aliases should be the
same. So maybe the build system could use pack for old ocaml and alias
for new ocaml. Packs would work as is and for aliases the build system
would generate the myLib.ml(i) automatically.

Should be fairly easy to do in _oasis, I hope.

MfG
	Goswin