Hi!
Excuse me if this is obvious, but I can't recall coming across
anything similar and a quick search returns nothing relevant:
struct Foo {
}
struct FooWrapper {
alias x_ this;
private Foo* x_; // doesn't work, as x_ is private
}
Basically, I want x_ to never be visible, except through the
"alias this" mechanism, at which point it should instead be seen
as public.
Assuming something like this is not already possible in a clean
way, I would like to suggest a tiny(I think) addition to the
language:
struct FooWrapper {
public alias x_ this; // overrides the visibility through the
alias;
private Foo* x_;
}
While I think this would be useful for the language, the reason I
want such a wrapper, is because I want to give opIndex, toString,
to a pointer, or, in fact just value semantics, while keeping the
rest of the interface through the pointer.
I thought about using a class instead of a struct pointer, but I
am not sure about the memory layout for classes, nor about the
efficiency of overriding Object's methods, so I didn't want to
risk making it any less efficient. If someone could shed some
light about D's class memory layout and general performance
differences to a simple struct (or a C++ class for that matter),
that would also be great. In general, more information about
these sort of things would be great for us also-C++ programmers.
:)
