On Thursday, 1 May 2014 at 21:40:38 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
I'll be blunt. What you say is technically sound (which is
probably why you believe it is notable)...
Well, I suppose that's not the MOST insulting brush-off I could
hope for, but it falls short of encouraging me to contribute
ideas for the improvement of the language.
I'll just add this: I happen to introduce a colleague to the D
webpage the other day, and ran across this in the overview: "D
... doesn't come with a VM, a religion, or an overriding
philosophy. It's a practical language for practical programmers
who need to get the job done quickly, reliably, and leave behind
maintainable, easy to understand code." This business that only
inherently parallel tests that never access disk, share setup,
etc. are TRUE unit tests smack much more of religion than
pragmatism. Indeed, phobos demonstrates that sometimes, the
practical thing to do is to violate these normally good rules.
Another overriding principle of D is that the easy thing to do
should be the safe thing to do, and dangerous things should take
some work. I don't see that reflected in the proposal to turn
parallelism on by default. This seems like a time bomb waiting
to go off on unsuspecting acolytes of the cult of
inherently-parallel-tests-onlyism.
If we don't want to consider how we can accommodate both camps
here, then I must at least support Jonathan's modest suggestion
that parallel UTs require active engagement rather than being the
default.
