Generic memory allocation in D

[claptrap]

On Saturday, 9 March 2024 at 00:09:38 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> It's not about performance, it's about competing notions of 
> clarity.

If you see the sentence "If file read", it reads like "if the 
file has been read".

That's the clarity you want.

The fact that you felt the need for a comment "//failed" on the 
next line belies the fact that on some level you understand that 
the preceding if statement is not obvious at first sight.

The simple and straight forward solution is

if (File.read(name, buf) == false)
             return null;