On Saturday, 18 May 2013 at 20:59:41 UTC, Simen Kjaeraas wrote:
@disable this is awesome, really. And you're right that it's
even better than
simple non-nullable pointers. Lastly, it's great that it's
getting fixes. It's
been one of my favorite non-working features. :p
The subject here is default constructor, not really nullable
pointer. @disable this() cost as much as default constructor, but
provide less. I don't see any objective reason to limit default
constructor as disabled but not enabled.
I'd even argue that it actually cost more as it introduce yet
another special case.
In a way, I fear that we'll end up like C++, with bare
pointers/references
being considered experts-only and 'special use', and everyone
will use smart
pointers instead.
No what will happen it that we will have null all over the place
with missing check, and no stack trace when it fails, because
NullPointerError have been decided to be bad.
regular references/pointer are used way more than in C++ because
you don't need to do the manual memory management that goes with
it in D.
We will have more bugs and slower programs due to null checks all
over the place, and unexpressed assumption about what can be null
and what cannot.
