Explicit default constructor for structs

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Friday, April 11, 2014 22:38:28 Daniel Murphy wrote:
> "monarch_dodra"  wrote in message
> news:rftskgfoeuvyeuvrusei at forum.dlang.org...
> 
> > *BUT*, if you happen to copy paste C++ code, and it *does* compile, then
> > it is pretty much expected to keep the same resulting semantics, yes.
> 
> These expectations will lead to disappointment.

One of the goals of D was to make it so that when _C_ code was compiled as D 
code, it either wouldn't compile or would have identical semantics, and I 
believe that that is still true save for a very short list of exceptions (the 
only ones that come to mind are that the calling conventions wouldn't be the 
same and that static arrays are value types in D whereas they're reference 
types in C).

However, that's not at all true for C++. You're probably more likely to be 
able to port Java code directly and have it have the same semantics than C++ 
code. A shining example of that is the semantics for variables of class types. 
In C++, if they're not declared as pointers, then they're value types, whereas 
they're always reference types in D.

Part of the whole point of D is to have better semantics than C++, so it's 
certainly not going to try and keep the same semantics as C++. For the most 
part, we haven't gratuitously changed the semantics, but there are a lot of 
places where we gained something by changing them, so we did.

- Jonathan M Davis