On Thursday, 5 July 2018 at 09:40:46 UTC, kinke wrote:
I failed to see a benefit from being able to use classes with static members only (abuse as namespace?)
Yeah, pretty much, but also static inheritance. You can see the pattern where I use it at https://github.com/JinShil/stm32f42_discovery_demo/blob/c324bbf861cf258a819478481521528fca88dcb3/source/stm32f42/pwr.d#L24
It's for an ARM Cortex-M microcontroller. The structure, layout, and memory locations of all memory-mapped IO registers (there are 100s of them) are all known at compile-time, so there's no need for instances of anything. The static inheritance allows me to reuse implementation code and also model the hierarchy according to my mental model. After all that's one of the pillars of D, modeling power.
Also, modeling them as static classes allows me to avoid the memory layout mess in the linker script (Yuck!), as all the memory addresses accompany the code itself. This also makes it much, much easier to cross-reference the code to the microcontroller's datasheet.
D's the only language I know of that can do this; it's not a strength, not a weakness.
Mike
