Inheritance of things that are note instance methods

[Adam D. Ruppe via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 3 August 2017 at 12:06:02 UTC, Arafel wrote:
> Does somebody know how it's even *supposed* to work?

virtual functions can be overridden. All others work as functions 
across shared namespaces. Overloads across namespaces need to be 
explicitly added to the overload set, see: 
http://dlang.org/hijack.html

> * Static functions are "virtual", i.e. there is a lookup of 
> parent classes if it's not found. This is not documented, and I 
> didn't even think it would work:

It isn't virtual, more like an import. Same as member variables. 
idk where this is in the spec though...

> This is a bit shocking, since the compiler must know for sure 
> which class I'm from, and I can also make it explicit:

There's no place in the binary for it to pass it that 
information. With a non-static member, `this` is passed as a 
hidden function argument. With static, there explicitly are no 
hidden function arguments (it is compatible with outside function 
pointers). The template can do it since it creates several 
copies... and as such is NOT compatible with function pointers.

The function pointer compatibility is fairly important.

> * Finally, things get even more confusing with templates: a 
> missing template will be looked up in "parent" classes, but a 
> template that exists but is not instantiable won't:

This has to do with the overload rules, see the hijack article 
linked above.