Syntactic Sugar for Virtual Constructors?

[Jarrett Billingsley]

"Janice Caron" <caron800 at googlemail.com> wrote in message 
news:mailman.89.1204269640.2351.digitalmars-d at puremagic.com...
> On 29/02/2008, Christopher Wright <dhasenan at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>  class Derived : AbstractBaseClass
>>  {
>>     static this ()
>>     {
>>        builders["whatever"] = { return new Derived1(); };
>>     }
>>  }
>
> Again, that would require the factory function to have compile-time
> knowledge of derived classes, which is precisely the thing to avoid.

Not necessarily.  If Derived were in a shared object, it would be loaded and 
then its static this() run, which would add itself to the list of builders 
in the base class, entirely at runtime.