On Sunday, 11 October 2015 at 20:35:05 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu
wrote:
Could you please point to the document you have already written?
For instance, we had a discussion with Walter and Mark that
eventually yielded DIP25. In there, I made the following proposal
:
http://pastebin.com/LMkuTbgN
I made several other very detailed proposal. Other did. It's not
about me here. Others simply abandoned as far as I can tell. I'm
just a stubborn idiot.
There's a bit of a stalemate here. So we have:
1. You say that DIP25 is a failure. More so, you demand that is
admitted without evidence. What I see is a feature that solves
one problem, and solves it well: annotating a function that
returns a reference to its argument. The syntactic cost is low,
the impact on existing code is small, and the impact on safety
is positive. Walter and I think it is the simplest solution of
all considered.
It is indeed the simplest. However, experiences that have been
made and discussed in the forum showed it was often too simple to
be really useful. I cited example of this, namely the RCArray
thing and the existence of DIP74.
I don't think the simplicity argument holds water in general as
long as we don't have the whole thing. DIP25 + DIP74 + ... must
be measured against the alternative.
2. You refuse to write a DIP under the assumption it will not
be taken seriously. Conversely if you do write a DIP there is
an expectation it will be approved just because you put work in
it. I don't think rewarding work is the right way to go. We
need to reward good work. The "work" part (i.e. a DIP) is a
prerequisite; you can't demand to implement a complex feature
based on posts and discussions.
No that is inaccurate. I think I have evidence that it won't be
taken seriously. To start with, there are already several DIP on
the subject and they are not discussed at ALL. Namely :
http://wiki.dlang.org/DIP35
http://wiki.dlang.org/DIP36
http://wiki.dlang.org/DIP69
http://wiki.dlang.org/DIP71
These do not even register as a blip on the radar. I don't see
how adding my to the pile would change anything.
There are not considered because DIP25 is "simpler" and you and
Walter "like it". As long as nothing changes here, there is
really no point in wasting my time.
So I'm not sure how we can move forward from here. If you want
to discuss DIP74, great, it can be discussed because it exists.
My personal opinion on DIP74 is it has holes and corner cases
so it seems it doesn't quite hit the spot. One option is to
make it work, another is to take a different attack on the
problem. But we need the appropriate DIP.
Let's start by the beginning: what good design was enabled by
DIP25 ? As long as none is presented, we can't consider it a
success.
