Library Typedefs are fundamentally broken

[Adam D. Ruppe via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 23 September 2014 at 00:01:51 UTC, Shammah Chancellor 
wrote:
> What exactly was wrong with the original typedef statement that 
> was deprecated?

I personally find it too inflexible; it virtually never does 
exactly what I need. BTW I've never used std.typecons.Typedef for 
the same reason.

But what are some examples of typedef? HANDLE and HMENU are close 
to useful indeed, I've used typedef for that kind of thing 
before. But it isn't perfect: do you ever want do do *handle? 
That's allowed with typedef. Do you want it to explicitly cast to 
void*? That's allowed with typedef.

People couldn't agree on if typedef should be a subtype or a 
separate type either, which fed the deprecation. Personally 
though I think that's silly, if what it does is well defined, we 
can keep it and do other things for the other cases. But it does 
need to be compelling over another feature to be kept and I'm not 
sure it is.

So I tend to prefer struct and a little alias this and disabled 
overloads to a typedef. A wee bit more verbose, but more flexible 
and correct too.