[swift-evolution] private & fileprivate

Sat Oct 8 18:12:17 CDT 2016

Sent from my iPad

> On Oct 8, 2016, at 5:58 PM, Xiaodi Wu <xiaodi.wu at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Very much agree with essentially all of that.
> 
> Personally, I'd also want to explore whether any submodule scope could just subsume fileprivate (i.e., files not otherwise in a submodule behave as though they are their own submodule for access control purposes) rather than occupy another slot between it and internal, but that's a discussion we can postpone until a submodule proposal takes shape.
> 

That's an interesting thought.  Files are such a concrete unit of scope that I think I would still prefer to see the file level access control as well, but I'm open to seeing specifics of other ideas when the time is right (which afaik is not Swift 4 phase 1).

>> On Sat, Oct 8, 2016 at 17:27 Matthew Johnson <matthew at anandabits.com> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> Sent from my iPad
>> 
>>> On Oct 8, 2016, at 3:24 PM, Xiaodi Wu <xiaodi.wu at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> On Sat, Oct 8, 2016 at 2:15 PM, Matthew Johnson <matthew at anandabits.com> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> On Oct 8, 2016, at 2:01 PM, Xiaodi Wu via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>> On Sat, Oct 8, 2016 at 12:02 PM, Karl via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>>> On 8 Oct 2016, at 16:47, Braeden Profile <jhaezhyr12 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> On Oct 8, 2016, at 6:58 AM, Karl via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> I was thinking that the domains themselves could be associated with a domain, so you could create alternate domains which are also publicly-visible, but distinct from the default, “public” domain.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> For example, if you have a bunch of methods which should be visible to subclasses, but you don’t want them to clutter your regular interface. Perhaps they have names which are confusingly-similar to the public API. I believe that is what “protected” is typically used for.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Yes, but “protected" was specifically put down by the core team, seeing that any code from outside the library should see the class as one well-designed whole, not something with complicated, visible implementation details.  If your class-internal methods are confusing (and aren’t necessary for normal use), they shouldn’t be made public in any way.  Subclasses would too easily confuse the distinction between your implementation methods and your public ones.
>>>>> 
>>>>> For what it’s worth, I was only confused by “private” and “fileprivate” for a minute or two until I looked up the actual proposal.  I haven’t had trouble with it, and it does actually provide more flexibility for code access at the file level than we had before.  Even if the syntax is clunky.
>>>> 
>>>> I’m not saying that (file)private is confusing - it’s very clear about what it does. But it is limiting; anything that wants access to those semi-private details needs to live in the same file. That’s clearly not scalable. Enormous files many thousands of lines long are easy for the compiler to digest, but less easy for humans to understand and navigate. In fact, I believe this whole “file-based” access control originally came out of the compiler’s implementation details.
>>>> 
>>>> I'm interested in more information about this. What sorts of code have you been writing where a file would have to be thousands of lines long in order to accommodate `fileprivate`? Many entire modules are only thousands of lines long--is there a reason this code couldn't be refactored into a module of its own? As mentioned by Matthew, isn't this calling for some notion of submodules?
>>> 
>>> There are rather significant optimization barriers at module boundaries right now.  These do not exist for the standard library due to its tight relationship with the compiler, but for the moment it is a non-trivial concern for 3rd party code that is performance sensitive.  This is effectively a language pressure in the direction of larger modules, at least for some domains.  (Hopefully this pressure will eventually be alleviated - there has been at least some talk in that direction)
>>> 
>>> Great point. IMO, it'd be important to identify how much of the desire for additional varieties of access modifiers represent workarounds to compiler limitations, because we'd be better off making optimization across module boundaries work better if that's the root of the issue. Certainly, also, submodules are a discussion that, having made a brief appearance at the end of Swift 3 evolution, would be ripe for Swift 4 phase 2.
>>> 
>>> As for this topic about additional access modifiers, I'd like to understand what current use cases motivate them that arise because the current syntax is insufficiently expressive, rather than compiler shortcomings or the lack of other features that are on the horizon. The latter sorts of motivation, IMO, would be more definitively addressed by tackling the root problem; adding additional syntax in order to work around compiler limitations seems as best inelegant.
>> 
>> I agree completely.  We definitely don't want to add features motivated only by current limitations.  
>> 
>> IMO there is plenty of motivation for submodules from a number of different angles.  If we do add them I think allowing an access control distinction between submodule and whole module makes a lot of sense.   That isn't sufficient motivation on its own of course, but is still very relevant to any discussion of any access level between fileprivate and internal.  I also believe it is very likely to be the best and most natural solution.  
>> 
>> That said, it's always good to keep pushing for better concrete examples and use cases.
>> 
>> As for the cross-module performance issue, I very much hope to see that solved independent of any new features (aside from perhaps some annotations that help the optimizer and give it more room to work by restricting our future options for change).
>> 
>> 
>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> What it would basically come down to is that the interface of the object would be separated in to blocks based on your access privileges. When viewing the interface, it wouldn’t look much different to an extension:
>>>> 
>>>> access(public) class TabController {
>>>>    var tabs : [Tab] { get }
>>>>    func closeTab(at: Int)
>>>> }
>>>> 
>>>> access(TabBarStuff) extension TabController {
>>>>     func close(tab: Tab)
>>>> }
>>>> 
>>>> I definitely want something between internal and fileprivate, at least. I don’t see any reason at all why objects shouldn’t be allowed to present optional “slices” of their interface to appropriate clients. In fact, that is what access control is all about. I just want to generalise it to allow for user-defined visibility scopes (as well as the default ones for public, module, file and scope). That leads to the question of what visibility those user-defined scopes would have; and if you leave them entirely open to adopt any scope (except themselves), then you end up with the ability to slice your API for different use-cases. Or we could be boring and limit them to the module they are defined in.
>>>> 
>>>> The whole reason I’m bringing this up is because I don’t like the “file” part of fileprivate. How I split my files up is a readability decision.
>>>> 
>>>> Karl
>>>> 
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