DIP25 draft available for destruction

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 2/7/13 1:34 AM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 06, 2013 at 10:09:48PM -0800, Walter Bright wrote:
>> On 2/6/2013 8:16 PM, Marco Leise wrote:
>>> As for the address taking, I hope it doesn't end up in being
>>> nannied to much by the language. Like in the case with printf,
>>> it could really piss people off that don't understand the
>>> reasoning behind it. Make the error message informative for
>>> that: "Potential escape of pointer to stack local" or
>>> similar.
>>
>> I think C++ missed an opportunity with reference types. All they are
>> in C++ are just another way to express a pointer. They don't really
>> offer any semantic improvement - you can even have null references.
>>
>> In D, we have an opportunity to define reference types as a kind of
>> "safe" pointer type - where we can get much of the advantages of
>> pointers without the potential for memory corruption.
>
> D ref types are currently highly crippled because of the inability to
> declare ref variables, which mandates ugly workarounds. It should be a
> first-class type qualifier IMO. (Yes I know it's currently a *function*
> qualifier, not a type qualifier... which makes it all the more ugly.)

Unfortunately type qualifiers have very high complexity costs. I think 
it's very neat that we managed to keep ref the way it is. Yes, I, too, 
would like to have a ref variable sometimes, but overall I'm please with 
the way it's working (post DIP25 especially).

Andrei