On 07/12/13 20:00, H. S. Teoh wrote:
In C, once you've committed to a particular implementation, you can't easily change it without rewriting large chunks of code. While it *is* possible to do this to some extent using void* and function ptrs and so on, that would introduce runtime overhead, whereas in D, it's only a compile-time difference. To avoid runtime overhead you'd have to make heavy use of macros, which quickly becomes a maintenance nightmare.
When I was writing a lot of C code, I used that approach a great deal -- I learned it from the internals of the GNU Scientific Library and found it very productive and useful for a lot of what I was working on. Ironically, when I later came into touch with C++'s generics I found them very strange and found it difficult to see the sense in them, because I was so used to having and making use of _runtime_ polymorphism in C.
