On Wednesday, 11 July 2018 at 07:30:59 UTC, FeepingCreature wrote:
Then just stick it in a Nullable. No explicit .init needed.
To clarify this point some more, since on reflection it's ambiguous: you might well say that "well yeah, the default constructor returns an invalid value, no shit it breaks." The semantics of Nullable are weird here though - Nullable!S constructs an S while pretending to not contain an S. The deeper problem is that there is straight up *no way* to implement Nullable correctly in a way that lets it handle types with @disabled this(); without using pointers there's no way to bypass S's destructor, and any implementation of Nullable that uses T.init explicitly dies when D tries to destruct it.
That would work, it's just a really horrible hack and I hate it. We're constructing a fictitious domain value that passes our invariants while having zero correspondence to the real world, *just to pass our invariants*. It's an obvious sign of a language issue.
Furthermore, note that this limits the amount of invariants we can define. For instance, we can't define an invariant that says that a value has to be registered in a central table somewhere - since our fictional value obviously won't be. Better to do bool isInitialized = false, and that's already crappy.
