[Article Submission] Have Your Efficiency, and Flexibility Too

[Lars T. Kyllingstad]

On Tue, 31 May 2011 02:36:58 -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote:

> Getting in just under the wire here. I seem to have misjudged the scope
> of my topic, it ended up a bit large... Anyway, here's my entry:
> 
> http://www.semitwist.com/articles/EfficientAndFlexible/SinglePage/

Nice article. :)  Some of the code snippets were a bit on the longish 
side, but I can't really say how they could be reduced.  The narrative is 
a nice touch.

May I make two small suggestions regarding the ex5_meta_deadDuck1.d 
snippet?  Firstly, I cringe whenever I see is(typeof((){...})) being used 
to test whether something compiles or not.  I'd much prefer

    immutable bool isIGizmo = __traits(compiles,
    {
        ...
    });

Granted, __traits() is pretty ugly too, but at least you have the 
"compiles" directive making it clear what's going on.

Secondly, you could replace the immutable(void[0]) member with an enum, 
which also doesn't take up any space.  I find

    enum _this_implements_interface_IGizmo_ = true;

a lot more descriptive of its purpose.  Then you could also replace the 
"auto dummy = T._this_implements..." line with

    static assert (T._this_implements_interface_IGizmo_);

which will fail if _this_implements... isn't declared or if it's declared 
to be false.

-Lars