On Thursday, 22 December 2011 at 02:29:10 UTC, Froglegs wrote:
From what I understand D classes are reference types, which would imply to me that they are either always garbage collected or rather less likely, reference counting.
They are garbage-collected.
Which is fine and all, but since structs don't support virtual functions, doesn't this pretty much force you to use classes and therefor GC if you want virtual functions?
You can allocate classes anywhere, if you're OK with forfeiting safety guarantees. For example, see emplace in std.conv:
http://dlang.org/phobos/std_conv.html#emplace
So why don't structs support virtual funtions? I would like to have a type that is not GC'd or ref counted or any other nonsense, but supports virtual functions..
Value type polymorphism has shown to be problematic. One notable problem is object slicing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_slicing
Am I missing something here? Thanks
I *think* the language allows implementing something akin to value type polymorphism (sans syntax sugar), but currently the required compiler features (alias this, compile-time symbol/address evaluation) are not implemented well-enough to test my idea.
