Article: Alternatives to C++

[tsbockman]

On Monday, 8 March 2021 at 21:00:47 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:
> My only regret is the space cost of the monitor pointer of all 
> D class objects. So, I hereby help populatize something I 
> learned recently: extern(C++) class definitions don't have that 
> monitor pointer:
>
> // Smaller object:
> extern (C++) class C {
>   // ...
> }

I think this critical bug I discovered today needs to be fixed 
before that's a good idea: dynamic casts seem to be completely 
broken for extern(C++) classes.
     https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=21690
This can manifest as a logic error, memory corruption, or a 
security vulnerability depending on the circumstances.

More mundanely, extern(C++) mangling can't distinguish some 
overloads that extern(D) can. Thankfully, this problem can be 
worked around in an easy (albeit ugly) way:

     extern(C++) class C { extern(D):
         // ...
     }

In particular, I found the above necessary to enable overloading 
on `shared` with extern(C++) class methods.