Using a struct as a wrapper for an extern(C) opaque type, no default constructor, what do?

[Jeremy DeHaan via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Thursday, 17 December 2015 at 04:59:20 UTC, Jakob Ovrum wrote:
> On Thursday, 17 December 2015 at 04:05:30 UTC, Jeremy DeHaan 
> wrote:
>> http://dpaste.com/3FH3W13
>
> Also, I would be wary of lazy initialization. We have bad 
> experiences with it for AAs and standard containers. A typical 
> example would be:
>
> void foo(Wrapper w)
> {
>     ...
>     w.doTheThing();
>     ...
> }
>
> void main()
> {
>     Wrapper w;
>     foo();
>     w.inspect(); // `w` is still a null reference here
> }


Thanks for the heads up. I'll think more on this, but you made a 
good point here.

And I guess what I was talking about before is that using a 
factory method feels klunky to me. If the things I am wrapping 
had been written in D they could use default initialization, so 
it feels wrong to do otherwise. I also just don't really like 
factory methods. They feel like a workaround that the end user 
has to deal with. But that's just me.