On Wednesday, 4 December 2013 at 07:00:58 UTC, Manu wrote:
You mean you'd like virtual-by-default as you say (as is now),
or you'd
like final-by-default at the cost of the transition?
Sorry, I meant to say I'd like final by default, but I can
understand people being hesitant with the breakage required.
There is a proposed transition process across a few releases
which should
make the transition relatively painless, at least, it wouldn't
be error
prone, since warnings/deprecation messages would assist the
process.
1. 'virtual' keyword is introduced, 'override'-ing unattributed
methods is
a warning.
2. it becomes deprecated, but you can still compile with -d.
3. it becomes an error, but surely you've already taken the
opportunity to
update your software, right?
This transition also works well. It does mean that the
performance benefits would not occur until step 3, but while
giving time to transition it also immediately provides the safety
benefits. Ideally it would even catch bugs in peoples code as
they make the required changes to add virtual where needed. The
only issue is that it pretty much guarantees that most libraries
that make use of classes and are no longer maintained will fail
to compile, but honestly, I don't know think many projects will
compile anyways when using a compiler / Phobos version that's
more than a year newer than when the library was last modified.
