Future of memory management in D

[Alexandru Ermicioi]

On Friday, 19 November 2021 at 15:39:54 UTC, 12345swordy wrote:
>
> It violate encapsulation. Which at that point you might as well 
> make the l-value public.
>
> -Alex

It doesn't. Just like any other setter in any other language, it 
does not constraint you to return a private field in the object 
itself. You can return any value from any source, be it in object 
itself, a sub-object, on heap or on stack. The only constraint is 
to have it stored somewhere, so you can return a reference.

The main problem here, is that people expect for a value type to 
behave like a reference type here, which isn't the case in any 
other language too. Just try for example to return an int from a 
getter in java, and do ++ on it. You'll get the same behavior as 
in D.

Best regards,
Alexandru.