Writing Bug-Free C/D Code

[Henning Hasemann]

I just start a few little things.

1.)
Most of the bugs I had when starting with D where that I simply forgot
to initialise members in the c'tor:

class Foo {
  void foo() { ... };
}

class Bar {
  Foo myFoo;
  void bar() {
    myFoo.foo();
  }
}

Of course, because here myFoo is default initialised to null this always gives
a segfault where myFoo is first being used in such a way,
so it is very easy to track down (if you use a debugger at least).

But sometimes I'd find it nice if there was a way to tell D:
Warn me at compile time if it is clear that some class instance members
will be null.

Of course you must be able to tell D exceptions to this, as you will want
to have a few members be null until later.

I have no good idea what this tool would syntactically look like or
if it would make sense to have it a compiler switch or whatever.
Probably the idea is almost bullsh*t nevertheless, because you get
used to initialise your members after a short while.

2.)
Another thing would be easy support for stack traced exceptions.
I tried flectioned last weak or so (just for this purpose) but it
didnt want to compile with my code (I think I was still on dmd-1.007 so
it might have been a bug there). I think STE's are of use
to many developers so they should be put into phobos or so.

3.)
Please change the implicit integral casting rules to be more c-like.
This has been discussed here and I cant remember a good argument
against casting only in such a way data doesnt get lost.
(ie: int->float is okay, but float->int, or int->uint is not)
I had errors that where very hard to track down, because somthing like
(-1 * 4u) yields the unsigned int representation of -4 which is
4294967292, which is rather unintuitive when there is no explicit cast.

I know, changing this might break some code, but I cant help considering
code that relies on such implicit casting rules broken nevertheless.

Henning

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