On Friday, 28 February 2014 at 18:42:57 UTC, Steve Teale wrote:
All the D aficionados seem to wet their pants over
meta-programming, but I struggle to find a place to use it.
IIRC, I used it in a couple of places when I was trying to write
library stuff for MySQL, but in my current project, I use it
only
once. That's when I want to stuff something onto my undo stack.
For that I have two template functions - push(T)(MybaseClass* p,
T t, int ID), and pushC, which is just the same except that it
checks the top of the stack to see if the ID there is the same
as
what it is wanting to push.
This has served me very reliably, but I struggle to find other
places in the whole application where I would benefit from
templates.
Is this typical - libraries use templates, applications don't,
or
am I just being unimaginative?
Steve
It really depends on what you're writing. If you look at Phobos,
which is meant to be as general as possible, I'd estimate that
about 70% of it is templated, possibly more. I find that general
utilities (such as your push function) are pretty much always
template, while most program logic isn't. If you find yourself
writing mainly program logic with very little need for utility
functions, then it shouldn't be surprising that you are not using
templates that much. The one exception is when doing stuff that
requires a lot of boilerplate; mixins and template mixins are
extremely useful for that.
