On Thursday, August 23, 2012 23:27:18 Namespace wrote: > My idea was to declare your own .init in a class, not in a struct.
Well, the init for classes will always be null, because class references are nullable. That's part of the language. Making it so that a class' init value wasn't guaranteed to be null would definitely complicate both the compiler and generic code (since it could no longer rely on the fact that a class' init value was null and would have to do additional checks when it cared). Right now, you have the guarantee that declaring a class reference allocates nothing, and changing init so that it could actually initialize the reference would break that guarantee. That would actually be a serious problem in cases where you need to be able to declare a class reference but can't initialize it when declaring it (e.g. a member variable, static variable, or global variable must be known at compile time if it's directly initialized, which can't be done with classes, since while you can sometimes use classes in CTFE, they can't be persisted beyond CTFE). If you want something that isn't nullable, you'll need a type which which isn't nullable, which means using a struct. I know that you want non-nullable references, but for D2, the best that you're going to get is a struct which wraps a class. - Jonathan M Davis
