On Wednesday, 17 June 2020 at 11:50:27 UTC, Per Nordlöw wrote:
Should a range-compliant aggregate type realizing a parser be
encoded as a struct or class? In dmd `Lexer` and `Parser` are
both classes.
In general how should I reason about whether an aggregate type
should be encoded as a struct or class?
The heuristic I use is 'do I need polymorphism?' If no, it's a
struct. Another thing that may be worth considering is reference
semantics. The latter is easy to do with a struct, while
polymorphism is generally a class-only thing (but check out
Tardy, which Atila Neves recently posted in the Announce group).
I would say I basically never use classes in D - pointers and
arrays give me all the reference semantics I need, and
polymorphism I almost never need.
--
Simen
