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0007-const-instance-methods.md

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const-qualified Instance Methods

  • Proposal: 0007
  • Author(s): Chris Bieneman
  • Sponsor: TBD
  • Status: Under Consideration
  • Planned Version: 202x

Introduction

HLSL does not currently support const instance methods for user-defined data types. This proposal seeks to add support for const instance methods.

Motivation

The absence of const instance methods causes some challenges since HLSL injected ASTs do have const and non-const instance methods. Further, since variables can be const-qualified, without the ability to specify const there are some cases that cannot be worked around without breaking const-correctness.

DXC has received a number of issues relating to this. Two recent issues are listed below:

In the first issue, a user defined data type's methods are basically unusable if the data type is placed in a ConstantBuffer. This results from the ConstantBuffer access returning const & objects.

The second issue describes a similar problem, where overloaded operators on instances of const-qualified user-defined types are unusable.

Proposed solution

Following C++, we should enable support for const instance methods and operator overloads. When a method is marked const, the implicit this parameter should become a const &.

This change should not introduce any syntactic ambiguities or have any incompatibilities with existing HLSL code.