Andrei Alexandrescu | |
|---|---|
 Alexandrescu at ACCU 2009 | |
| Born | 1969 (age 54–55) |
| Nationality | Romanian, American[2] |
| Education | Politehnica University of Bucharest and University of Washington |
| Occupation | Developer of the D programming language |
| Known for | Expert on C++ and D programming[3] |
| Spouse | Sanda Alexandrescu |
| Website | erdani |
Andrei Alexandrescu (born 1969) is a Romanian-American C++ and D language[3] programmer and author. He is particularly 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 MOJO library.[4] He contributed to the C/C++ Users Journal under the byline "Generic<Programming>".
He became an American citizen in August 2014.[5]
Alexandrescu received a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Polytechnic University of Bucharest (Universitatea Politehnica din București) in July 1994.[6][7]
His first article was published in the C/C++ Users Journal in September 1998. He was a program manager for Netzip, Inc. from April 1999 until February 2000. When the company was acquired by RealNetworks, Inc., he served there as a development manager from February 2000 through September 2001.[6]
Alexandrescu earned a M.S. (2003) and a PhD (2009) in computer science from the University of Washington.[8][9][10]
In 2006 Alexandrescu began assisting Walter Bright on the development of the D programming language.[11] He released a book titled The D Programming Language in May 2010.
From 2010 to 2014, Alexandrescu, Herb Sutter, and Scott Meyers ran a small annual technical conference called C++ and Beyond.
Alexandrescu worked as a research scientist at Facebook for over 5 years, before departing the company in August 2015 in order to focus on developing the D programming language.[12]
In January 2022, Alexandrescu began working at Nvidia as a Principal Research Scientist.[13]
Expected is a template class for C++ which is on the C++ Standards track.[14][15] Alexandrescu proposes[16] 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 datatypes 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:
int parseInt(const string&); // Returns 0 on error and sets errno.
or
int parseInt(const string&); // Throws invalid_input or overflow
he proposes the following:
Expected<int> parseInt(const string&); // Returns an expected int: either an int or an exception
From 2000[17] onwards, Alexandrescu has advocated and popularized the scope guard idiom. He has introduced it as a language construct in D.[18] It has been implemented by others in many other languages.[19][20]
