Reddit: why aren't people using D?

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

Jarrett Billingsley wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 5:56 PM, Michiel
> Helvensteijn<m.helvensteijn.remove at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Eldar Insafutdinov wrote:
>>
>>> from your post:
>>>
>>> property int length {
>>>     get() { return this.len; }
>>>     set(newLen) { this.len = newLen; }
>>>     void opIncrement() { this.len++; }
>>> }
>>>
>>> I don't think that's flexible to overload every operator to get the best
>>> performance. As Walter likes to say the best way should be the most
>>> obvious. Besides we forgot that D2 allows to return references, which
>>> eliminates the issue.
>> If your property really just hides a private member variable, it was
>> probably for encapsulation purposes or because you want redundant actions
>> to be taken for every access. If you return a reference, you give unlimited
>> and unrestricted access to that variable with only one call, and you might
>> as well not have used a property at all.
>>
>> If your property is derived -- that is, if it doesn't directly mirror a
>> variable --, there is no reference to return.
>>
>> Besides, in D, you can probably use mixins to copy the entire interface of a
>> type into the property without code duplication.
> 
> You're suggesting adding something like 25 operator overloads to every
> property.  Can you say "code bloat"?
> 
> Why not just use the following solution, which has been proposed
> God-knows-how-many-times and already has precedence in other languages
> (like C#)?
> 
> obj.prop op= value;
> 
> Simply becomes:
> 
> obj.prop.set(obj.prop.get op value);

I think this would be inefficient in many cases.

Andrei