LDC 1.11.0 beta

[Mike Franklin]

On Thursday, 5 July 2018 at 09:40:46 UTC, kinke wrote:

> I failed to see a benefit from being able to use classes with 
> static members only (abuse as namespace?)

Yeah, pretty much, but also static inheritance.  You can see the 
pattern where I use it at 
https://github.com/JinShil/stm32f42_discovery_demo/blob/c324bbf861cf258a819478481521528fca88dcb3/source/stm32f42/pwr.d#L24

It's for an ARM Cortex-M microcontroller.  The structure, layout, 
and memory locations of all memory-mapped IO registers (there are 
100s of them) are all known at compile-time, so there's no need 
for instances of anything.  The static inheritance allows me to 
reuse implementation code and also model the hierarchy according 
to my mental model.  After all that's one of the pillars of D, 
modeling power.

Also, modeling them as static classes allows me to avoid the 
memory layout mess in the linker script (Yuck!), as all the 
memory addresses accompany the code itself.  This also makes it 
much, much easier to cross-reference the code to the 
microcontroller's datasheet.

D's the only language I know of that can do this;  it's not a 
strength, not a weakness.

Mike