D Best Practices: Default initializers for structs
Jonathan M Davis
jmdavisProg at gmx.com
Sat Nov 6 21:28:09 PDT 2010
Here's an interesting thought. All built-in types in D default initialize to the
closest thing that they have to an error. Floating points arguably do the best
job of this with NAN, and integral types arguably the worst with 0, but that is,
as I understand it, the basic idea: default initializations initialize to an
error value (or as close to one as you can get). That way, it quickly becomes
obvious when you failed to properly initialize one before using it. So, the
question is this: what about structs?
Structs default initialize to whatever their member variables are directly
initialized to. That may or may not be an error state, but I don't get the
impression that people generally _try_ and make it an error state. What should
be the best practice on this? Should we generally _try_ and make struct
initializers initialize to error states, just like the primitive types do - with
the idea that you really are supposed to initialize them or assign to them
before you use them. Or should we treat structs differently and try and make
their default states something other than an error state?
By no means am I claiming that we should _always_ try and make a struct's init
property an error or _always_ make it valid (that's going to depend on what
exactly the struct is for and what it does), but which would be the best
practice in the general case?
- Jonathan M Davis
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