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Twiddling my thumbs while I wait for the compiler to finish

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I seem to be in some sort of state where if I ever touch this one file I trigger a complete rebuild of all our source. 

I'm in the middle of taking some of our core types and doing the dual job of making them

  1. Immutable objects
  2. Good const citizens

I'm trying ot architect this work for maximum clarity and simplicity.  I'm also trying to get it in a form that would be easy to port to C# and would end up with code that I wouldn't want to change once ported over.

It's easy to create immutable objects in C#.  The readonly modifier does a great job of that for me.  However, the lack of an ability to declare something const is extremely frustrating.  About the only thing I can do to ensure the same behavior is to provide a deep clone on every single one of my types and then send a clone over to any callers.  This is extremely frustrating and error prone.

I understand that in C++ it's purely an affectation and anyone can get around the constness of an object trivially.  However, I would love it if our runtime added support to runtime checking of 'const.'  The only reasons I can think of for us not to do this are:

  1. Perf overhead of checking that it's ok to call a specific method on a const instance of a type
  2. Needing to go through the BCL to update all methods with teh correct const information.

Both would cost a lot in terms of time necessary to do it.  However, I see the benefit as being so high.  Unfortunately, the longer we go without adding this, the more unlikely it will ever be that we'll ever be able to add it.

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