[article] Language Design Deal Breakers

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Monday, May 27, 2013 09:59:32 deadalnix wrote:
> On Monday, 27 May 2013 at 07:45:41 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> > I don't see why. NotNull would statically prevent assigning
> > null to it (which
> > is easy to do, since null has its own type) and will assert
> > that any
> > references assigned to it are null. You then have the guarantee
> > that NotNull!T
> > is never null. What would a built-in type do that that doesn't?
> > The one point
> > where null could get in - when constructed from a nullable
> > reference - would
> > have to be checked with a built-in type as well. The only way
> > to prevent it is
> > to make it illegal to assign a nullable reference to a
> > non-nullable one and
> > make it so that construction has to occur within the the
> > non-nullable
> > reference - e.g. NotNull!T(args).
> 
> That is not enough. NotNull must be initialized, so the compiler
> have to track initialization in way it don't do today. This is
> the exact same processing required to ensure non null references.

@disable this(); would solve that.

- Jonathan M Davis