On Wednesday, 4 April 2018 at 04:49:10 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
I'm working on a simple older idea to get it out of the way in
preparation for the more difficult DIPs to come:
https://github.com/andralex/DIPs/blob/ProtoObject/DIPs/DIPxxxx.md
This is not officially reviewable yet, but conveys the gist and
could use some early feedback. Any insight will be appreciated.
I was going to propose exactly this approach to get rid of the
monitor in my objects. It's a huge cache penalty that I have to
pay (for no use, because I think monitors are an awful approach
to multi-threading) just to get proper reference semantics and
some other OO features. If we also get proper modernized objects
that's a sweet, sweet cherry on top. Le cool! This is exactly the
kind of house cleaning that will benefit D, and I hope to see
more of. Very reassuring.
Regarding the output range replacing toString. That's an obvious
improvement. Yet, before that is set in stone, give the following
at least some thought. I've always wondered about the use of
output ranges. Yes, they can be more convenient to implement than
input ranges, but they are less convenient to use because they
are not composable (unless you create some kind of adapter Fiber
that makes them input ranges). For instance, if you want to print
an Object to the terminal with some color, you can't use a chain
of ranges like `yourObject.toString.colorizer`, you have to
output to some intermediary buffer. Just by coincidence,
yesterday I was once again wondering about this and I decided to
prototype an input-range-based formatter. By restricting the
initial version to a compile-time format string it actually made
it *very* easy to implement a MVP. You basically just
std.range.chain the first formatter item range and the remaining
tail. And you can implement it piecemeal by using sformat to
format integers/floats; this (temporarily) requires a small
buffer in the range, but avoids the unbounded memory allocation
for the stringy parts of the formatting (the literals, etc.),
which is the truly problematic part.
