Brainstorming: Explicit instantiation of function template with `auto ref` parameters

[Paul Backus]

On Monday, 24 February 2025 at 00:24:03 UTC, Manu wrote:
> Just yet another in the endless stream of cases why ref should 
> be part of
> the type and not a 'storage class'! Literally everything ref 
> touches gets
> more complex than it should.
> *🎉*

+1000

The consistent, principled way to bring ref into the type system 
would be to assign all lvalue expressions a type of ref(T), and 
all rvalue expressions a type of T, with an implicit ref(T) -> T 
conversion for copyable T.

Unfortunately this is not really feasible for D, since it would 
be an enormous breaking change. But anyone designing a new 
language should consider this approach.