Subverting polymorphism is fun!

Revision 100 of Pyd implements the API changes I discussed previously. There are still some rough edges, however. (These are mostly related to operator overloading. Static member function wrapping is broken, too.) I thought it would be amusing at this point to discuss Pyd's support of polymorphic behavior.

Take the following:

class Base {
    void foo() { writefln("Base.foo"); }
    void bar() { writefln("Base.bar"); }
}

class Derived : Base {
    void foo() { writefln("Derived.foo"); }
}

void polymorphic_call(Base b) {
    b.foo();
}

Let's say that a user writes a subclass of Derived in Python, and overloads the foo method:

class PyDerived(Derived):
    def foo(self):
        print "PyDerived.foo"

If an instance of PyDerived is passed to polymorphic_call, we would (optimally) expect it to print out "PyDerived.foo". The challenges involved in implementing this should become obvious if you start thinking about vtables.

Pyd solves this problem by introducing "shim" child classes. For every class that is exposed to Python, a shim class is generated. Every method that is being exposed to Python is overloaded in this shim, in such a way as to dispatch to Python if it detects that this is an instance of a Python subclass, and call the parent class's method otherwise.

If my explanation was non-sensical, then it is probably best to think of it as a black box. Suffice to say that, in the above example, Base and Derived each get a shim generated for them.

So for every class you want to expose to Python with Pyd, there are suddenly four classes involved:

1. The original class
2. The shim class
3. The Python class directly wrapping the original class
4. The Python class wrapping the shim

Number 3 might come as a suprise. Although the original class is wrapped, this is only done so that D functions can return instances of the original class directly to Python. Number 4 is the class which may be best thought of as the Python version of your D class.

Update Feb 22: Revision 101 of Pyd changes this. There is now only one Python class wrapping both the original D class and its shim.