With the introduction of public by @Lilith, many packages will want to mark their unexported public symbols that way. Since public is only available in Julia 1.11, the current recommended way to do this in 1.10 is with the Compat.jl package. Before we add it everywhere, I’m wondering if there are any negative side effects to it? @stevengj seems to think it’s fine but I’d love to get other opinions. [image] What does the new "public" keyword actually do? General Usage It’s probably installed anyway on your machine, since so many packages use it. And as a runtime dependency it should be quite small — most of it is precompiled away if you have a recent Julia version. In particular, it depends on 4 stdlibs: Dates, LinearAlgebra, TOML and UUIDs.

Why not just do macro public(ex) if VERSION >= v"1.11.0-DEV.469" args = ex isa Symbol ? (ex,) : Base.isexpr(ex, :tuple) ? ex.args : error("something informative") esc(Expr(:public, args...)) else nothing end end @public x, y ? I strongly doubt this is worth bringing in Compat.jl for, that package is quite hefty with lots of piracy and invalidations.

If you don’t already depend on Compat.jl, I’d recommend VERSION >= v"1.11.0-DEV.469" && eval(Meta.parse("public foo, bar"))

If it’s such a minimal change, why is there no motivation to add this no-op to v.1.10? Because it’s a dirty hack?

Because features are not backported in semver. There’s a rather extensive discussion here: [image] New Julia LTS? Are many using the current (Julia 1.6) LTS? General Usage No, usually features are not backported, only bugfixes

Is there a way to combine this trick with multiple lines of public declarations? I get a ParseError on 1.11.0-rc3 when trying VERSION >= v"1.11.0-DEV.469" && eval(Meta.parse("begin public foo public bar end"))

[image] hill: Is there a way to combine this trick with multiple lines of public declarations? @static VERSION >= v"1.11" && eval(Meta.parse("""include("public.jl")""")) I’ve tried this a while ago without eval, generally it worked but had some side effects (not in the code execution, I can’t remember exactly what), and I switched to Compat.jl after the opinion by stevengj. P.S. Discourse makes 2 lines of code out of 1 source line because of &&

Why not this then? @static if VERSION >= v"1.11" include("public.jl") end

This should be sufficient: VERSION >= v"1.11" && include("public.jl") @static partially evaluates expressions at macro-expansion time which is only useful if macro expansion is invalid on a previous version. include macro expands just fine on all versions so there’s no need for @static.

[image] gdalle: Why not this then? That’s exactly what I did and now can’t remember what was wrong, but there was something (Documenter.jl, CI, something like that).

Could’ve been CoverageTools? I had something like it here

I guess most important is if the tooling that can benefit from that will support any of the alternative ways to declare public in 1.10.

Is Compat.jl worth it for the `public` keyword?

General Usage

gdalle September 4, 2024, 3:03pm 4

Because features are not backported in semver. There’s a rather extensive discussion here:

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Is Compat.jl worth it for the `public` keyword?

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