Summary

I would like to give package developers a way to declare names that are part of their package's public API without needing to export them.

This feature request has two parts:

1. The Base.@public macro, which declares a name as public without exporting it.
2. The Base.public_not_exported(m::Module)::Vector{Symbol} function, which returns the list of all non-exported public names in the module m.

This feature request is non-breaking. Therefore, it can be implemented in a Julia 1.x release.

Part 1: Base.@public macro

For example, suppose that my package has a public function named fit. Because that word is so common, I don't want to export it from my package. But I want to indicate that it is part of the public API in a structured way that downstream tools (Documenter.jl, JuliaHub, editors/IDEs, etc.) can understand.

So in this example, I could do something like the following:

module Foo export cool_stuff # public and exported  @public fit # public but not exported  function cool_stuff end function fit end function private_stuff end # private  end # module

Part 2:Base.public_not_exported function

The signature of the function will be: Base.public_not_exported(m::Module)::Vector{Symbol}.

Example usage:

julia> Base.public_not_exported(Foo) 1-element Vector{Symbol}: :fit

Related Discussions

There is some related discussion in JuliaDocs/Documenter.jl#1507. However, I really want this to be something that any tool can use, so I don't want it to be specific to Documenter.