Question

Does containers in D have value or reference semantics by default? If they have reference semantics doesn’t that fundamentally hinder the use of functional programming style in D (compared to C++11’s Move Semantics) such as in the following (academic) example:

auto Y = reverse(sort(X));

where X is a container.

Answer 1

Whether containers have value semantics or reference semantics depends entirely on the container. The only built-in containers are dynamic arrays, static arrays, and associative arrays. Static arrays have strict value semantics, because they sit on the stack. Associative arrays have strict reference semantics. And dynamic arrays mostly have reference semantics. They’re elements don’t get copied, but they do, so they end up with semantics which are a bit particular. I’d advise reading this article on D arrays for more details.

As for containers which are official but not built-in, the containers in std.container all have reference semantics, and in general, that’s how containers should be, because it’s highly inefficient to do otherwise. But since anyone can implement their own containers, anyone can create containers which are value types if they want to.

However, like C++, D does not take the route of having algorithms operate on containers, so as far as algorithms go, whether containers have reference or value semantics is pretty much irrelevant. In C++, algorithms operate on iterators, so if you wanted to sort a container, you’d do something like sort(container.begin(), container.end()). In D, they operate on ranges, so you’d do sort(container[]). In neither language would you actually sort a container directly. Whether containers themselves have value or references semantics is therefore irrelevant to your typical algorithm.

However, D does better at functional programming with algorithms than C++ does, because ranges are better suited for it. Iterators have to be passed around in pairs, which doesn’t work very well for chaining functions. Ranges, on the other hand, chain quite well, and Phobos takes advantage of this. It’s one of its primary design principles that most of its functions operate on ranges to allow you to do in code what you typically end up doing on the unix command line with pipes, where you have a lot of generic tools/functions which generate output which you can pipe/pass to other tools/functions to operate on, allowing you to chain independent operations to do something specific to your needs rather than relying on someone to have written a program/function which did exactly what you want directly. Walter Bright discussed it recently in this article.

So, in D, it’s easy to do something like:

auto stuff = sort(array(take(map!"a % 1000"(rndGen()), 100)));

or if you prefer UFCS (Universal Function Call Syntax):

auto stuff = rndGen().map!"a % 1000"().take(100).array().sort();

In either case, it generates a sorted list of 100 random numbers between 0 and 1000, and the code is in a functional style, which C++ would have a much harder time doing, and libraries which operate on containers rather than iterators or ranges would have an even harder time doing.