Namespacing

In order to work with C’s namespace limitations, I’ve designed the following system:

Namespaces

In C, there is a GCC extension (also supported by clang and TCC) to allow for dollar signs in identifiers. This provides a way to have compiled C code which segments its imports into different namespaces. For example Foo$Baz would be the identifier Baz in the namespace Foo, and would be guaranteed to not collide with a user-chosen name like FooBaz.

// File: foo.tm
my_var := 123

struct Baz(x:Int)
    member := 5
    func frob(b:Baz -> Int)
        return b.x

// File: foo.tm.h
...
typedef struct foo$Baz_s foo$Baz_t;
struct foo$Baz_s {
    Int_t $x;
};

extern Int_t foo$my_var;
extern const TypeInfo_t foo$Baz;

extern Int_t foo$Baz$member;
Int_t foo$Baz$frob(struct foo$Baz_s $b);
void foo$main();
...

// File: foo.tm.c
...
Int_t foo$my_var = I_small(123);
Int_t foo$Baz$member = I_small(5);

static Text_t foo$Baz$as_text(foo$Baz_t *obj, bool use_color)
{
    if (!obj)
        return "Baz";
    return Texts(use_color ? Text("\x1b[0;1mBaz\x1b[m(") : Text("Baz("),
                    Int$as_text(stack(obj->$x), use_color, &Int$info), Text(")"));
}

public Int_t foo$Baz$frob(struct foo$Baz_s $b)
{
    return ($b).x;
}
...

And on the usage site, the code include ./foo.tm compiles to #include "./foo.tm.h" in the header and use$foo() in the code that is executed.