On Sunday, April 08, 2012 23:59:01 Francois Chabot wrote: > I was already aware of the non-virtualness of templates, and to > tell the truth, I much prefer it this way. Maybe it's my C++ > background showing here, but is this something people have been > asking for? It sounds crazy to me.
Of course, it's something that people have been asking for. It would be fantastic to be able to have templated functions which are virtual. And if you don't really understand how templates work or don't think it through enough, it seems crazy that they _wouldn't_ be virtual. But there are very practical reasons why doing so is more or less infeasible (it's certainly infeasible with how things currently work in D), and once it's explained how templates don't interact with virtual tables very well and all that, it becomes pretty obvious that there's no way that templates can be virtual. There's no question that there are people who want it though. And the fact that some stuff in D really needs to be templated (e.g. a lot of range-based stuff really only works well if it's templated, and you can't support multiple string types very well without templates) makes it so that the lack of virtual templates in classes can be frustrating at times. - Jonathan M Davis
