On Saturday, 29 November 2014 at 11:37:52 UTC, bearophile wrote:
Some of this "hibernation" could be caused by the latest
"revolution" threads by Andrei. But probably there are also
other causes.
Or perhaps I'm just mis-measuring the kind of D activity, and
everything is going on as well as usual :-)
I got very happy when Walter announced "@nogc" and his intent to
create a "better C" switch on the compiler.
I felt this was a nice change of direction, but I also feel that
this direction has stagnated and taken a turn for the worse with
the ref-counting focus… Phobos is too much of a
scripting-language library to me, too much like Tango, and
hacking in ref counting makes it even more so.
To me, a "better C" would have a minimal runtime, a tight
minimalistic standard library and very simple builtin ownership
semantics (uniqe_ptr). Then a set of supporting libraries that
are hardware-optimized (with varying degree of portability).
However, I think those that are interested in D as a tight system
level language have to spec out "better C" themselves as a formal
language spec sketch. I'd be happy to contribute to that, maybe
we could start a wiki-page. Since a "better C" would break
existing code, it would allow a more "idealistic" language design
discussion. I think that could cut down on the noise.
I think an experiment would be worth it.
