On 1/2/2015 2:38 PM, Joseph Rushton Wakeling via Digitalmars-d wrote:
On 02/01/15 22:16, Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d wrote:
I don't believe it is impossible to implement in D, in fact, Bartosz Milewski
proposed such a system some years back. I do believe that people will simply
reject such a system as too hard to use.
Isn't that dependent on the use-case, though? We know very well that games
programmers (for example) will jump through programming fire, compared to many
other developers, in order to achieve their desired results.
Take a look at noted game developer Jonathan Blow's videos. They'll jump through
hoops for performance, but I see little evidence they will do so for
correctness. It's like have a nun stand over you and rap your knuckles every
time your handwriting isn't perfect. Nobody likes that.
Assuming that we're not going to lose the default case of the GC being
responsible for allocation/ownership unless the programmer specifies otherwise,
what's wrong with having a rigorous ownership system in place that can be made
use of if and only if the programmer sees value in it?
Because of the viral nature of it, you cannot avoid it. It's like trying to
avoid using const.
For a topical example, check out the threads here on the Ddoc syntax. Many have
strongly argued against the simple, general, powerful and orthogonal macro
syntax in favor of an idiosyncratic mass of special cases. It's classic.
OK, tongue in cheek time, but if simple, powerful and orthogonal is the goal,
why are we messing around with this D stuff instead of just writing everything
in Lisp? ;-)
Exactly.
I hope it's obvious what I'm getting at here -- a really simple, general and
powerful syntax can become horrendously complicated to deal with once you start
going beyond a certain scale of combinations.
Don't I know it :-)
