What would be the consequence of implementing interfaces as fat pointers ?

[Walter Bright]

On 3/31/2014 10:02 PM, Manu wrote:
> It's a really common pattern, it's obviously very useful, but it's surprising to
> me that people think that it's like, 'cool'.
> I get why it's done, and it's cool that D can do this (I use it a lot in my
> code), but I don't feel it's particularly elegant.

'alias this' is inelegant (sorry Andrei) but it was designed for precisely this 
purpose - being able to use a struct to wrap any other type, and forward to and 
override behaviors of that type. Nobody has found a better way.

Fortunately, the inelegance can be encapsulated within that type, and the user 
of the type need not be even aware of it.

Remember my halffloat implementation? It relied on 'alias this' to work. Just 
try doing that in C++ <g>.