On Thu, Jul 15, 2021 at 08:24:57PM +0000, Scotpip via Digitalmars-d-learn wrote: [...] > For starters, it's now clear to me that a strong understanding of > Templates is essential to make much headway - that's why I got stuck > here. They are dealt with towards the back of the books, but you > really can't understand much of the library code without them. That's > the first gap I'm going to fill. [...]
My personal favorite approach to D template functions is to not think of them as templates in the first place, but rather as functions with *compile-time* parameters (in addition to the usual runtime parameters). I.e., parameters that get baked in at compile-time. Since the parameters are processed at compile-time, they can do a more than the usual runtime parameters can, such as receiving types and aliases and other such things that only exist at compile-time. The function can then act on these arguments at compile-time to adapt itself to the task thus specified, without incurring the runtime overhead of a runtime check. T -- There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.
