struct subtyping?

[spir]

Hello dear D community,

I need to express a system of related types. The values are actually values, meaning I absolutely need value semantics (no referencing, else I would be forced to explicitely copy on each assignment). Also, they are structured, record-like thingies.
I was very pleased to discover that D has class-like structs: we can define methods and even custom constructors. Even nicer, it provides a kind of literal notation for struct "specimens" (instances). This brings me handy plain value records. Great!

But for any reason, this logic is not pushed to the point of providing type hierarchy by subtyping. It would have been great for me, since much of the common functionality is generic. Without a type hierarchy, I need to duplicate it on each struct type, which is _bad_ (as any programmer knows ;-).

I would like to learn about possible workarounds, or other alternative approaches to such problems, if ever you now any. Also, I would love to read about the rationale for _not_ having struct type hierarchies (probably this would not be a big deal, since D has it for classes (*)) Or maybe I have simply not correctly understood available docs?


Thank you,
Denis

(*) Oberon is rather close to D on this point: it has records with "type-bound procedures" (read "methods"). But these records are "extendable" (read "subtype-able"). Methods are bound via dynamic (single) dispatch. D-like classes are provided by record-pointer types, on instances of which dereferencing is automatic (when accessing slots) (only the type def explicitely mentions reference).
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