Static constructor

[SealabJaster]

On Wednesday, 6 January 2021 at 17:05:02 UTC, ludo wrote:
> ...

Using a static class like this seems to mostly be a design 
decision.

i.e. instead of using something like

```
openalGetMutex();

// OR

OpenAL openal = ...;
openal.getMutex();

// OR I guess even this

g_openal.getMutex();
```

They specifically want the interface to look like:

```
OpenAL.getMutex();
```

So in otherwords, this class is essentially being used as a 
unique namespace for all of the other functions. Another way to 
look at it is just a singleton without a `.instance` getter.

As for some of the other stuff, Associative Array literals in D 
can't actually be used at compile-time (at least, last time I 
tried), so they have to be created inside of the static 
constructor.

Next is the mutex. `Object` is the base class that every class in 
D will implicitly inherit from, like in C# for example. Object 
has a `.monitor` field which is basically just a mutex, so is 
used with multi-threading synchronisation. I find it a bit odd 
that they're just returning an object instead of a Mutex (module 
core.sync.mutex), but I'm sure there's a reason why.

(The README of this project states that this is a resurrection of 
some old project, and even refers to D as "Digital Mars", so this 
code may or may not have been built on a very old version of D 
originally.)

A better explanation of the monitor field can be found: 
https://forum.dlang.org/post/op.vqi9vrqueav7ka@steve-laptop

Hope this answers some questions.