Stroustrup is disappointed with D :(

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 22 September 2015 at 20:42:44 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:
> However, it is not possible in general e.g. if the object is 
> passed to a function by reference, that function can call any 
> virtual method on it so the vtbl pointer must have been set 
> upon entry to the constructor, at every level of the hierarchy.

Ugh, yes, but using "this" externally on a partially constructed 
object is  reeeaaaally ugly... If we want to get closer to 
something not horribly flawed we would have to do something like:

constructor() {
    super();
    this.vtable = super::vtable
    dostuff( this cast as super)
    fully_init_myself()
    this.vtable = myself::vtable;
    domorestuff(this)
}

What a mess...

BTW, the language Beta had type variables that could be virtual. 
It was used for things like the element types for containers. In 
that case the super class could instantiate a specialized type 
provided by subclasses as a virtual type. Kind of neat, but I 
never used it much...

> I tried to determine the actual author. It was not easy and I 
> still don't know. :)

Me neither. I'm getting the impression that I am looking at a 
wall of guidelines-graffiti.