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What's the difference between polluting the global namespace with a class name, or with a function name?

I get it, I also experience some reticience when adding free/bare functions in Swift. But maybe it's because of 15 years of OOP programming.

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Maybe the problem here is the global namespace. I really like modern javascript where you have to explicitly import everything.

Maybe not so much of a problem in C++ but look at JavaScript. With the millions of dependencies / libraries you import, if they all used free standing functions you would inevitably end up with collisions.

In c++ functions can be marked ‘static’ to make them translation-unit local, or you can put them in a library namespace, if they’re public. In a particular js bundler/runtime usually a module system is used (or just iife/umd wrap) which prevents function names from populating globals.

The problem is unqualified imports though, not free functions.

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