Tofu Ninja:
What do you think are the worst parts of D?
There are several problems in D/Phobos, but I think the biggest
one is the development process, that is currently toxic:
http://forum.dlang.org/thread/54374de0.6040...@digitalmars.com
In my opinion an Open Source language with such development
problem goes nowhere, so I think this needs to be improved.
There are several possible ways to improve this situation, but
perhaps the may one that can work is: Walter has to delegate
another slice of its authority to the community of core dmd
developers. This will cause some problems, perhaps an increase in
confusion and pull reversions, Walter may lose a bit of his grasp
of the dmd codebase (but this can be avoided if he reads the pull
requests code), but I think overall the advantages in the long
term are going to be bigger than the disadvantages.
Regarding the product (and not the process), the design of a
principled, sound, and flexible memory ownership system is an
important part of D design to work on in the following months.
It's going to add some complexity to D, but this is not the kind
of complexity that kills a language, because if it's well
designed it's going to give easy to read compile-time errors,
it's not going to limit too much the variety of things that are
currently allowed in D, and it's going to statically remove a
significant amount of run-time bugs that are currently easy to do
in D. The complexity that causes problems is not the one that
requires you to understand a part of a well designed type system:
it's the pile of arbitrary special cases and special cases of
special cases you see in C++. D considers safety and correctness
very important points of its design, and I agree with the
importance of such points.
Bye,
bearophile
