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Andrei Alexandrescu | |
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![]() Alexandrescu at ACCU 2009 | |
Born | 1969 (age 55–56) |
Nationality | Romanian, American [2] |
Education | Politehnica University of Bucharest and University of Washington |
Occupation | Developer of the D programming language |
Employer(s) | Netzip–RealNetworks Nvidia |
Known for | Expert on C++ and D programming [3] |
Notable work | Books: C++ Coding Standards Modern C++ Design The D Programming Language Software libraries: Loki, MOJO |
Spouse | Sanda Alexandrescu |
Website | erdani |
Tudor Andrei Cristian Alexandrescu [4] (born 1969) is a Romanian-American programmer and author specializing in the programming languages C++ and D. [3] He is especially known for his pioneering work on policy-based design implemented via template metaprogramming. These ideas are articulated in his book Modern C++ Design and were first implemented in his programming library, Loki. He also implemented the move constructors concept in his library MOJO. [5] He contributed to the C/C++ Users Journal under the byline "Generic<Programming>".
He became an American citizen in August 2014. [6]
Alexandrescu received a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) degree in Electrical Engineering from Polytechnic University of Bucharest (Universitatea Politehnica din București) in July 1994. [7] [8]
In September 1998, his first article was published in the C/C++ Users Journal . From April 1999 until February 2000, he was a program manager for Netzip, Inc. When the company was acquired by RealNetworks, Inc., he served there as a development manager from February 2000 through September 2001. [7]
In 2001, Alexandrescu released the book Modern C++ Design , reviewed as one of the five most important C++ books by C++ expert Scott Meyers. [9]
In 2003, Alexandrescu earned a Master of Science (M.S.), and in 2009, a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in computer science from the University of Washington. [10] [11] [12]
In 2006, Alexandrescu began assisting Walter Bright in developing the D programming language. [13] In May 2010, he released a book titled The D Programming Language.
From 2010–2014, Alexandrescu, Herb Sutter, and Scott Meyers ran a small annual technical conference named C++ and Beyond.
Alexandrescu worked as a research scientist at Facebook for over 5 years, before leaving the firm in August 2015 to focus on developing the D language. [14]
In January 2022, Alexandrescu began working at Nvidia as a Principal Research Scientist. [15]
Along with Walter Bright, Alexandrescu has been one of the two main designers of the D language, and the main maintainer of the standard library Phobos from 2007–2019. He is the founder of the D Language Foundation. His contributions include the module ranges
. He is the author of The D Programming Language book.
Expected is a template class for C++ which is on the C++ Standards track. [16] [17] Alexandrescu proposes [18] Expected<T>
as a class for use as a return value which contains either a T or the exception preventing its creation, which is an improvement over use of either return codes or exceptions exclusively. Expected can be thought of as a restriction of sum (union) types or algebraic data types in various languages, e.g., Hope, or the more recent Haskell and Gallina; or of the error handling mechanism of Google's Go, or the Result type in Rust.
He explains the benefits of Expected<T>
as:
For example, instead of any of the following common function prototypes:
intparseInt(conststring&);// Returns 0 on error and sets errno.
or
intparseInt(conststring&);// Throws invalid_input or overflow
he proposes the following:
Expected<int>parseInt(conststring&);// Returns an expected int: either an int or an exception
From 2000 [19] onwards, Alexandrescu has advocated and popularized the scope guard idiom. He has introduced it as a language construct in D. [20] It has been implemented by others in many other languages. [21] [22]
Today, Alexandrescu is a research scientist at Facebook, where he and a team of coders are using D to refashion small parts of the company's massive operation.