std.boxer vs Any

[Bill Baxter]

Daniel Keep wrote:
> 
> Bill Baxter wrote:
>> Daniel Keep wrote:
>>> And just to throw a little more wood on the fire:
>>> http://www.prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?DanielKeep/Variant
>>>
>>> :P
>>>
>>>     -- Daniel
>> Maybe you could comment on what makes yours different/better than the
>> alternatives, then.  Do we really need three different versions of this?
>>  Are they suited for different purposes?
>>
>> --bb
> 
> Well, the primary difference between mine and std.boxer is that mine
> works in Tango out of the box.
> 
> The other reason I wrote it was because of something Pragma posted about
> on the Tango forums about making a Box that was easier to use.  The
> major improvement is the use of opAssign that allows you to directly
> assign to a Variant.  I also like to think that Variant is easier to use
> than std.boxer.
> 
> The whole "operator overloading" business was done mostly because I
> wanted to see if it *could* be done.  :P
> 
> Really, I think there's only so much you can do with a variant type in
> D, and Box and Variant each do about 90% of it (not the *same* 90%, mind
> you; Variant doesn't do the "call a vararg function using a Box array"
> trick.)  In the case of Box and Variant, the differences are mostly just
> implementation and interface issues.

Looks like maybe yours avoids the opaque storage gc problem too?

--bb