On Sunday, 30 September 2018 at 11:11:09 UTC, Nicholas Wilson
wrote:
On Sunday, 30 September 2018 at 09:30:38 UTC, Vijay Nayar wrote:
Is there a way to either have a constant reference to a class
that can be set to a new value, or is there a way to convert
the class variable to a class pointer?
Alex has mentioned Rebindable, which is the answer to your
first question.
To answer your second question, no
class A {}
A a:
`a` is always a (possibly null) reference to a class instance.
You can have pointers to class references (which is what `&a`
gives you) but that has two indirections between the variable
and the data, which if you want high perf is probably not what
you are looking for.
Thanks everyone for the insight. I also finished reading
Jonathan's article:
http://jmdavisprog.com/articles/why-const-sucks.html
I've run into just about every single problem described there,
but had no idea just how deep the problem goes. So it was a
depressing read, but I'm glad to have the deeper understanding.
I'm definitely more open now to see what "__mutable" could offer
as was discussed at DConf2018, though I'm curious about how it
would remain compatible with "immutable".
