On 6/15/2014 6:50 AM, Peter Alexander wrote:
The fear of meta programming comes from Boost, and rightly so in my opinion. Boost is written with the assumption that users will never have to read its source code. When it comes to debugging and performance tuning however, that assumption is shattered.
For years I avoided C++ templates (even though I implemented them in DMC++) because they were just so dang hard to read. D originally was not going to have templates for that reason.
But I eventually discovered that hiding behind the complexity of C++ templates was a very simple idea - templates are just functions with compile time rather than run time arguments. (Isn't it amazing that I could implement C++ without figuring this out? I still don't understand that.) That was the enabling breakthrough for D templates.
In fact, templates engender such an "OMG! Templates! I don't get Templates!" aura about them that I convinced Andrei to not even use the word "template" in his book about D!
