alias typeof(foo) food;
const int * foo = null;
alias typeof(foo) good;
static assert( is (food == good));
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bug.d(5): Error: static assert (is(int* == const(int*))) is false
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This is the root cause of many subtle and mysterious bugs. For example, bug 2080 "ICE(mangle.c) alias corrupts type inference of static variables"
The problem is that, in something like "const int * foo", a StorageClassDeclaration is used to specify "const", and "int * foo" is a member of it. When semantic is run on the StorageClassDeclaration, the const/immutable/shared gets transferred into the members.
BUT when there is a forward reference, StorageClassDeclaration::semantic() has not yet been run. All its member declarations haven't got their storage class yet. So the forward reference gets the type without const.
Although const is D2-specific, the same issues arise in D1 as well, because it uses StorageClassDeclaration too.
I'm not sure of the best way to solve this. I don't understand why StorageClassDeclaration exists at all -- why isn't the storage class applied by the parser, instead of in the semantic pass?