• Arlon Brandy (30/30) Feb 23 2014 Today I hit two problems essentially which got me thinking about
• Rikki Cattermole (6/37) Feb 23 2014 There is also a work around (I can't remember who posted it

"Arlon Brandy" <arlon cheruff.com> writes:

Today I hit two problems essentially which got me thinking about 
how structs are used in D by most of the code I've seen so far. 
Both problems are in:

http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=9513

So the RedBlackTree create excessive copies of large structs via 
binaryFun, that and the obvious workaround also necessitates use 
of a template. It seems that people use structs to indicate one 
of two things, they want a type they can pass around and return 
by copy such as vectors/matrices etc. or just a way to allocate 
something on the stack, usually because of the need for 
deterministic resource handling or for performance reasons.

One of the great things about the D is that it allows you to 
specify with the type how it should be used by choosing struct vs 
class, so you can say at the same time whether the data should be 
stored on the heap and whether it should be passed by copy or by 
reference.

It seems to me that it might nice also to have a sub-division 
within the "struct" to allow the user to indicate a struct that 
should be passed by reference also like a class. It could be the 
same in every way except it's always passed by reference and 
people would have to write their own dup or something for when 
they want to copy it.

This could also solve the problem of:

     functionWithRefParams(LargeStruct.init, LargeStruct.init)

These new structs would always be passed by reference, and I 
guess lvalues would be transformed to temporary stack objects by 
the compiler so that they never have to be copied. To me the 
"scope ref" proposal looks a bit like C++ rvalue references and I 
thought this might be simpler and more useful but I don't know 
it's probably not a good idea.

"Rikki Cattermole" <alphaglosined gmail.com> writes:

On Sunday, 23 February 2014 at 14:36:36 UTC, Arlon Brandy wrote:
 Today I hit two problems essentially which got me thinking 
 about how structs are used in D by most of the code I've seen 
 so far. Both problems are in:

 http://d.puremagic.com/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=9513

 So the RedBlackTree create excessive copies of large structs 
 via binaryFun, that and the obvious workaround also 
 necessitates use of a template. It seems that people use 
 structs to indicate one of two things, they want a type they 
 can pass around and return by copy such as vectors/matrices 
 etc. or just a way to allocate something on the stack, usually 
 because of the need for deterministic resource handling or for 
 performance reasons.

 One of the great things about the D is that it allows you to 
 specify with the type how it should be used by choosing struct 
 vs class, so you can say at the same time whether the data 
 should be stored on the heap and whether it should be passed by 
 copy or by reference.

 It seems to me that it might nice also to have a sub-division 
 within the "struct" to allow the user to indicate a struct that 
 should be passed by reference also like a class. It could be 
 the same in every way except it's always passed by reference 
 and people would have to write their own dup or something for 
 when they want to copy it.

 This could also solve the problem of:

     functionWithRefParams(LargeStruct.init, LargeStruct.init)

 These new structs would always be passed by reference, and I 
 guess lvalues would be transformed to temporary stack objects 
 by the compiler so that they never have to be copied. To me the 
 "scope ref" proposal looks a bit like C++ rvalue references and 
 I thought this might be simpler and more useful but I don't 
 know it's probably not a good idea.

There is also a work around (I can't remember who posted it 
originally) but to move a struct to heap its basically:

struct T {}
T t;
T* ptrT = [t].ptr;