On Tuesday, 18 February 2014 at 07:45:10 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
It is like traveling back in time when parametric polymorphism
was debated in university papers and everyone was inventing
their own code generation tool.
Back to mid-90's compiler technology when only Ada supported
generics, C++ started to adopt some form of genericity at ISO
meetings and everything else where academic languages like
Eiffel, Modula-3 or Standadard ML.
We are in 2014, not in the early 90's. So to ignore what
happened in mainstream language design in the last 20 years, is
nothing more than an opinionated political decision against
generics.
I understand the sentiment that it is 'backwards', but what
exactly on a practical level is harmful about people writing
their own code generation tools?
On Monday, 17 February 2014 at 22:53:47 UTC, Asman01 wrote:
I don't think so. Did you know that some of they are the same
guys from Bell Labs which created C, UNIX, Plan9, UTF8 etc?
I'm aware of that, but I'm also aware that there are few things
in the world more agonisingly complex than writing a C++
compiler. I think I read Walter say somewhere that it took him
ten years! That's ten years of domain-specific experience working
with generics in the language with the most complex
implementation of generics in existence. My impression is that no
amount of experience in other aspects of language design would be
a substitute for this specific experience, and hence I think it
makes more sense to attribute the effectiveness of D's generics
implementation to Walter's extensive experience implementing
generics than to attribute it to generics being easy to implement
well. If generics are easy to implement, then why isn't there
another language with the compile-time power of D that's not a
monster like C++ or a Lisp?
