Tudor Andrei Cristian Alexandrescu (born 1969) is a Romanian-American programmer and author specializing in the programming languages C++ and D. 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. He contributed to the C/C++ Users Journal under the byline "Generic<nowiki><Programming></nowiki>".
He became an American citizen in August 2014.
Alexandrescu received a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) degree in Electrical Engineering from Polytechnic University of Bucharest (Universitatea Politehnica din BucureÃÂti) in July 1994.
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.
In 2001, Alexandrescu released the book Modern C++ Design, reviewed as one of the five most important C++ books by C++ expert Scott Meyers.
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.
In 2006, Alexandrescu began assisting Walter Bright in developing the D programming language. In May 2010, he released a book titled The D Programming Language.
From 2010âÂÂ2014, 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.
In January 2022, Alexandrescu began working at Nvidia as a Principal Research Scientist.
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 2007âÂÂ2019. He is the founder of the D Language Foundation. His contributions include the module <code>ranges</code>. He is the author of The D Programming Language book.
Expected is a template class for C++ which is on the C++ Standards track. Alexandrescu proposes <code>Expected<T></code> 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 <code>Expected<T></code> as:
For example, instead of any of the following common function prototypes:
or
he proposes the following:
From 2000 onwards, Alexandrescu has advocated and popularized the scope guard idiom. He has introduced it as a language construct in D. It has been implemented by others in many other languages.