On Wednesday, 31 December 2014 at 00:09:15 UTC, Walter Bright
wrote:
On 12/30/2014 1:27 PM, "Marc =?UTF-8?B?U2Now7x0eiI=?=
<[email protected]>" wrote:
In general, I get the impression from both DIP25 and DIP69
that both are
motivated by minimizing the change to the existing language,
instead of looking
for the most powerful solution (that may have other use-cases
besides the ones
under consideration). I.e., instead of asking which concepts
are behind the
problem in question, how these concepts could be expressed in
an ideal world,
and then making compromises to fit them into D, it seems like
we're starting
with some premises (as few changes as possible, no type
modifiers), and then
look for a solution that needs to sacrifice the smallest
number of use cases to
stay within the constraints. This is particularly bad if our
premises are going
against the nature of the problem we want to solve, because
then we are
guaranteed to get a bad solution.
On the other hand, power just because we can add it is not
always a good thing. C macros are very powerful, but experience
has shown it is the wrong kind of power.
So... how does this apply to our problem concretely? Do you
believe a full blown ownership/lifetime system is "the wrong kind
of power"? Remember, we're talking about an ideal world at first.
If after thorough discussion it turns out that it can't be
integrated into D, at least we know that it's probably not
possible. But I haven't seen any indications that this is the
case; in fact, it's not even been discussed.
Also, programmers do not really want a complex annotation
system. They want to just write code in the most obvious manner
and have it work correctly. Having a powerful (but complex)
system is not very attractive.
But a powerful system doesn't need to be complicated. In fact, a
system with a handful of general and orthogonal features is
likely easier to understand and handle in practice than one with
lots of (even trivial) edge cases and exceptions.
