This is kinda rhetorical, since I've asked this a million times, and we all know the answer... but seriously; why can't we declare ref locals?

Lots of functions return a ref; and we need to capture the result of those functions appropriately.

ref T f();

void t()

{

  ref T result = f();  // <-- there's no good reason to reject this

}

I don't understand why this doesn't come up every few days, everytime a new user appears. Is this really okay? Why does this make me feel so frustrated, but nobody else seems to care?

... "Use a pointer!" ...

void t()

{

  T* result_ptr = &f();  // seriously?

}

I feel embarrassed by this suggestion, why don't you feel embarrassed by this suggestion?

It's also pretty shit that taking a pointer of a function's result like that is not compatible with ufcs, where it instead attempts to create a function pointer.

It gets worse when the function is property-like.

void t()

{

  T* prop_ptr = &myThing.prop;

}

error: cannot implicitly convert expression `& f` of type `T delegate() ref` to `T*`

A new D user will look at that and think it's stupid... at least; I look at that and I think it's stupid!

ref locals already please, this has gone on long enough!