auto ref is on the docket

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 22 June 2015 at 04:11:41 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
> Walter and I discussed what auto ref for templates should look 
> like and reached the conclusion that an approach based on 
> lowering would be best. I added a proposed lowering to 
> https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dmd/pull/4717.

So, you're basically suggesting that have an auto ref parameter 
on a non-templated function basically does the combinatorial 
explosion of function definitions that you get with templated 
functions except that all of the combinations are instantiated 
(the one difference then being that all of the overloads except 
the one with all refs would just be wrappers calling the one with 
all refs)? That doesn't sound particularly desirable me. It's 
better than writing all of those wrappers by hand, but that's 
still likely to be a fair bit of code bloat if you're using auto 
ref parameters much - and if the folks coming from C++ who have 
been begging for this get it, they _will_ start using it all over 
the place.

I would have thought that we'd define this such that the compiler 
introduced a variable restricted to the scope of the statement 
for each rvalue passed as an auto ref parameter rather than 
introducing function overloads. No, that's not quite as nice a 
lowering, but it would avoid a lot of extraneous function 
definitions.

- Jonathan M Davis