constants - What is the difference between const and immutable in D?

Question

What is the difference between the const and immutable type qualifiers in D?

Answer 1

Something that is const cannot be mutated via that reference but could be mutated by a mutable reference to the same data. Something that is immutable can't be mutated by any reference to that data. So, if you have

const C c = foo();

then you know that you cannot mutate the object referred to by c through c, but other references to the object referred to by c may exist in your code, and if they're mutable, they could mutate it and therefore change what c sees. But if you have

immutable C c = foo();

then you know that it's not possible for the object referred to by c to change. Once an immutable object has been constructed, it's illegal for it to be mutated, and unless you subvert the type system via casting, it's not even possible to have a mutable reference to an immutable object. And since immutable objects can be put into read-only memory if the compiler chooses to, you could actually get segfaults and the like if you ever tried to cast away immutable and mutate the object. The same goes for const, since a const reference could actually refer to an immutable object. Casting away either const or immutable and then mutating the then mutable object is undefined behavior and should basically never be done.

And since an immutable object can never be mutated even by another reference, reading an immutable object from multiple threads is completely thread-safe. So, immutable objects are implicitly shared across threads, whereas everything else which isn't explicitly marked with shared is considered thread-local. immutable also provides better optimization opportunities to the compiler than const does, because it's guaranteed to never change, whereas a const object can change through another reference to the same data.

For value types, there isn't really much difference between const and immutable (since you can't have mutable references to non-mutable value types), but for reference types, there is a significant difference.