Replacing AA's in druntime

[H. S. Teoh]

Hi all,

My AA implementation is slowly inching closer to being ready to replace
aaA.d. So far I've been writing the implementation outside of object_.d
for ease of testing & development; now I'm ready to start moving stuff
into object_.d to start working on integration with druntime. So I'm
wondering how the current stuff works.

Is it correct that when the compiler sees a declaration like:

	int[string] aa;

it automatically translates that to struct AssociativeArray(K,V)?

What about the functions in aaA.d? I presume the compiler generates
calls to them whenever it sees an AA construct like "x in y", "x[y]",
etc?

Right now, I've implemented opBinaryRight!"in", opIndexAssign, and
opIndex; will the compiler know to invoke these methods, or will it
still go through aaA.d? I presume the latter? If so, I was thinking that
I can simply forward these calls to struct AssociativeArray, but the
problem is I wouldn't know which instance to forward it to since the
aaA.d functions only get typeinfos and an opaque pointer.

(There are also other issues, such as potential code bloat from
instantiating AssociativeArray(K,V), since everything is in the template
struct member now. But I'm not too worried about that yet; once the AA
implementation is fully dissocciated from aaA.d, it should be relatively
easy to factor out common code and/or replace the implementation with
something better.)


T

-- 
Unix was not designed to stop people from doing stupid things, because that would also stop them from doing clever things. -- Doug Gwyn