On Thursday, 1 March 2018 at 16:37:02 UTC, aliak wrote:
I've put up a little experiment If you're interested: https://github.com/aliak00/optional
Nice! Optional is like std's Nullable with extra bells and whistles to make it as painless as you can offer it. I've read all of Optional's source, skimming the dispatching introspection magic, and it's a concise wrapper that is as transparent as it can get.
I can envision using this Optional type whenever I want nullable class reference, and use normal D class references as non-nullable references together with a codebase-wide rule that assigning null to normal D references is always a bug.
Even the generated compiler error messages are good: Optional!C x = some(new C()); int y = x; // Error: Cannot implicitly convert from Optional!C to C.
a.dispatch.i; // not ideal, but is at least safe no op.
Hah, I've toyed with some examples, and this stuck out as verbose because everything else was really smooth. Optional!int dispatches wonderfully without extra syntax, whereas class C {}; Optional!C needs the extra dispatch before calling methods.
-- Simon
