Andrei Alexandrescu:
The issue is template code bloat. My impression from being in touch with the C++ community for a long time is that virtually nobody even talks about code bloat anymore. For whatever combination of industry and market forces, it's just not an issue anymore.
There is no proof that template bloat won't be a problem in D (I remember the first version of the D Objective-C bridge failing because of code bloat, the second version seems to require changes in the D language). And it seems L1 code caches of CPUs aren't growing a lot (so I suggest to not ignore having lot of code to swap in and out of those 32 kbytes).
So maybe it will be useful to introduce in D some means to attack the code bloat problem from several sides at the same time.
Some time ago I have suggested one of such weapons, the @templated() that allows to select what parts of a struct/class are templated regarding to what template arguments (it's a refinement of an idea of Stroustrup).
Another weapon to attack the problem is introducing in the DMD back-end an optimization (already present in LLVM, but I think not used on default), merging of functions with the same body (leaving just a jump as the body of the removed function, to keep their function pointers distinct).
Bye, bearophile
