On Wednesday, 11 May 2022 at 05:41:35 UTC, Ali Çehreli wrote:
What are you stuck at? What was the most difficult features to
understand? etc.
- How to do deterministic destruction with programs that use
everything (struct / class / dynamic dispatch / GC / manual /
etc). This requires to understand what the runtime does, what the
gc does.
Interesting nonetheless.
- Some traps. Accidental TLS is a thing, top-level should
probably not be silently TLS.
People will loose hours on this completely preventable
thing.
What was the idea, optimize code without people knowing?
- `shared static this()` vs `static this()` is another trap.
Honestly would have preferred `__threadlocal`. It's not
like being thread-local is something completely normal or without
consequence for platform support.
- Some features lack an escape hatch, notably `pure`. pure
leaks into identifiers, like `pureMalloc`. Trying to add `pure`
fails on a large codebase.
- `@safe`/`@trusted`/`@system` is good but the definition of
what `@trusted` means has to be remembered from the programmer.
For example `Mutex.lock()` is `@trusted`, it could have
been `@system` to let user review their usage of locks. You have
to wonder "can a lock()/unlock() corrupt memory?". People can use
that to mean "@reviewed" instead. Because it is up to us, the
exact meaning will float in the D subcultures. A function which
has been marked `@trusted` does not receive any review whan
changed later. It will not mean the same as `@trusted` in another
codebase.
- Generic code typically has bad names (domain-less) and
worse usability. It's often not pretty to look at. Mostly
cultural, since D has powerful templates so they had to be
everywhere. UFCS chains are not that convincing when you are
worried about maintenance.
Phobos take short names for itself, this leads to pretty
complicated operations having a small screen estate.
- `assert(false)` being different and not removed by
`-release`. Keyword reuse seems entrenched but honestly a "crash
here" keyword would be more readable.
It is really 3 different things: assert, crash, and
unreachable.
Otherwise D is glorious and get syntax and usability right, which
puts it ahead of almost every other language.
