[swift-evolution] [Discussion] A Problem With SE-0025?

[Robert Widmann]

While implementing SE-0025 (fileprivate), I noticed an interesting bug in the proposal.  Under the implementation outlined there, any top-level structure, class, or enum declared private cannot possibly be instantiated and so cannot be used in any way.  Because of this, private top-level declarations are more often than not blown away entirely by the compiler for being unused.  It seems strange to me to allow a key language feature to act solely as a hint to the optimizer to reduce the size of your binary.  Perhaps the restrictions around private needs to be relaxed or the line between fileprivate and private needs to be investigated again by the community before inclusion in the language.

Thoughts?

~Robert Widmann