Reddit: why aren't people using D?

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Thu, 23 Jul 2009 13:10:59 -0400, Jarrett Billingsley  
<jarrett.billingsley at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 12:11 PM, Rainer Deyke<rainerd at eldwood.com>  
> wrote:
>
>> Yes, C++ has problems, but these problems can be fixed!  The
>> struct/class split, on the other hand, introduces many more problems
>> that are harder to fix.
>
> You know, this is like the first thing C++ users complain about on the
> IRC channel when they find D: "what if I want to turn a class into a
> struct, or vice versa?"
>
> I've been using D for five years, and I have never.
>
> EVER.
>
> Needed or desired to do that.  Nor have I heard anyone but new C++
> users complaining about it.

I did.

With dcollections, my nodes were classes at first, because they were  
supposed to be heap-allocated reference types.

However, when I realized that with a custom allocator, I could  
tremendously increase performance, I had to switch to structs.

What ended up happening is I simply aliased Node to node *, and that was  
that.  Come to think of it, I probably didn't put enough thought in my  
choice of classes to begin with.

This however, is not a true "change" since I just changed classes to  
struct references, not to actual value type structs.

I plan on doing some more class-to-struct changes, not sure how it will  
pan out.

But I think it certainly does come up that choosing struct or class is not  
an easy decision, and both can have advantages/disadvantages.

However, I don't think C++ solves that problem very well either.

The one thing I think is missing from D in this area is struct interfaces.

-Steve