Function name conflict: ADL / function merging?

[StefanKarpinski]

@tkoolen

My initial guess is that it would require a set of rules that work pretty well 95% of the time, but are fairly complicated and thus cause quite a bit of confusion 5% of the time. Regardless, the rock-solid solution for package developers would still probably be to avoid using using, as witnessed by Google’s C++'s style guide, Google C++ Style Guide, “Do not use using-directives (e.g. using namespace foo).”. On the other hand, this approach could still be a win in code that doesn’t need to be of ‘production’ quality.

I think the best approach may be to have an “explicit import bot” that goes around making PRs to packages to turn using X into explicit imports of the names in X that are actually used. That way people can write code with using for convenience but the bot would make the meanings explicit for them and also future-proof their code.