Fragile ABI

[Kagamin]

On Thursday, 16 August 2012 at 20:19:27 UTC, R Grocott wrote:
> That sounds clean in theory - but so does Pimpl, and I know 
> from experience that Pimpl tends to make a horrible mess out of 
> any codebase. It doesn't help that, as far as I know, COM is 
> Windows-only, and D doesn't natively support the 
> method-defaulting system you described.
>
> In practice, I think that proper interoperability w/r/t classes 
> and inheritance will tend be cleaner than coding strictly 
> against an interface. This can be demonstrated by choosing any 
> base-class derived-class pair, from any OO codebase, and 
> attempting to rewrite that parent-child relationship as a 
> server-client one.

What you ask for sounds quite similar to COM composition with 
delegation.
If the problem is just fields and vtable shifts, D interfaces 
should work too. Though there's no easy way for composition and 
delegation with interfaces in D AFAIK. This already led to the 
null_t hack, but the problem wasn't really solved.