Future of D style variadic fuctions

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Wednesday, May 09, 2012 11:38:05 Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> On 2012-05-09 08:10, SiegeLord wrote:
> > For the ignorant: I do NOT mean variadic templates as used by std.stdio.
> > 
> > I note that they are not mentioned in TDPL. What is the deal with them
> > and their future? I'll be very displeased if I have to recode a good bit
> > of Tango that uses them if they are removed... None of my attempts at
> > coding a replacement for them using variadic templates have matched
> > their efficiency (in terms of generated code size) or ease of use (they
> > invariably require a shim function).

I wouldn't expect something like that to be removed from the language at this 
point, even if it were determined that they had ultimately been a mistake. And 
just the fact that a major project such as Tango uses them so heavily would be 
a major reason to keep them. Walter doesn't like making breaking changes 
without good reason, and even then he's not quick to do it. Heck, there are 
plenty of features which are definitively going away (e.g. scope on local 
variables and delete) but they're _still_ haven't even been deprecated yet.

> I really hope they stay. Template functions cannot be virtual.

That's about the only reason that I can think of for keeping them if we were 
still in the stage where we were making major language changes. The lack of 
virtuality for templates can be a real pain at times (as much as it makes 
sense that it's that way).

- Jonathan M Davis