On 4/14/2017 7:27 AM, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
Even allowing for the fact that changes to the language definition should face a high bar (made higher by the general wish for non-breaking changes), that suggests that the 'champion'-based approach may run into difficulties when it comes to more fundamental contributions to the D language.
Fundamentally changing the language is a major undertaking. The language is complicated, there's a lot of baggage, and the reason things are the way they are is usually unclear. Having a handwavy post proposing such things is just not good enough.
It's a fact of life that 99% (made up number) of fundamental language change proposals are going to fail. What an intractable mess D would be if the daily stream of language proposals were implemented. I have more than enough trouble with regressions caused by previous language changes.
Nevertheless, if you peruse the PRs, a number of language changes have been made by various champions. There is the way import lookups are done now - a change implemented by myself and Martin, but proposed by others. The way Ddoc works has been altered significantly by others, such as having runnable embedded example code. Kenji made many subtle changes to how templates work.
I read deadalnix's posts. I pointed out major unaddressed issues, like how does it deal with an application using multiple independent methods of allocating memory.
If you or anyone else want to self-select as the champion for it to make it more complete, that's how things work. I work every day trying to keep D moving - I spent yesterday updating the /dmd/samples so they work again, nobody else wanted to do it. I also spent much time yesterday figuring out why Windows DLL support broke again. Nobody else was going to do that. I simply cannot turn every idea posted here into a detailed proposal.
Keep in mind that other languages, such as C++, will not even look at any proposals that are not detailed and complete. And that's just the start of a pretty brutal winnowing process. Their position is that if the proponent of a change is not willing to put in the work to make a detailed proposal, why should it be worth their time to investigate it? It can't work any other way.
