Static opCall Factory Method Doesn't Work for Inner Classes

[eris]

Hello fellow D'ers...

I'm writing a message passing kernel and scheduler.  "User-space" programs communicate with each other and the kernel through inboxes and outboxes which are allocated and tracked by the kernel.  If a user-space program wants to allocate an inbox called "stdin" and an outbox called "stdout" currently they simply ask the kernel to create one for them.

For example:   

auto my_stdin = kernel.createInbox(String)("stdin");
auto my_stdout = kernel.createOutbox(String)("stdout");

This works fine for me.  It is a pain, however, to make a new "create" method everytime I want to define a new structure.

I'd much rather use the "static <classname> opCall" mechanism which allows you to simply call the classname to have it generate an instance of that class.

Now the static opCall pattern I've gotten to work:

class A {

...

   static A opCall(args) {
        return new A(args);
   }

}

auto a = A(args);

That works fine if you want instances of a factory created by calling the factory.  For example:

CarFactory car = CarFactory(args);

It's a little syntactically awkward, but it works.  My problem is I want the kernel to act as a factory for inboxes, outboxes and a bunch of other things.  I'd like this to work:

class Kernel {
...
   class Inbox {
      ...
      static Inbox opCall(char[] name) {
         return new Inbox(name);
      }
   }

   class Outbox {
   ...
      static Outbox opCall(char[] name) {
         return new Outbox(name);
      }
   }

  ...
}

That way I just create a static opCall method for each kernel object and I get a factory method which could be used like this...

auto my_inbox = kernel.Inbox("stdin");
auto my_outbox = kernel.Outbox("stdout");

BUT....

Every syntax combination in D to express a static opcall on an inner class doesn't work.  Both 'ldc' and 'gdc' generate compiler errors that say that 'this' is not available for static opCalls.  When I take the 'static' keyword off the opCall declaration the compiler error becomes something like: 'this' is required to access the opCall method.

I was getting pretty tired when I gave up on this last night, but the problem is still eluding me.  Am I just trying to do this the wrong way?  I know the "createInbox" method works. Perhaps I should make separate factories for every structure, but that seems harder than just making create methods.

If I can get this to work, I think I could create a mixin that would generate automatic factory methods.

(This is probably obvious and I was just too tired  last night.)

Thanks for your help,

eris