On Sunday, 24 December 2017 at 16:51:45 UTC, Patrick Schluter
wrote:
That's the biggest problem with C++, they pile on relentlessly
half baked feature after half baked feature in a big dump that
no one with a life can ever grasp.
I think D has more first class language features (and thus
special casing) than C++. For instance, C++ lambdas are just
sugar over objects and most of the new stuff is primarily library
features with some minor language tweaks to back it. So I don't
think the core C++ language itself has changed dramatically.
Like, constexpr is mostly about allowing things that were
forbidden, but it is opening new ways to structure code, which in
turn "deprecates" some old clumsy idioms… Except those old clumsy
idioms linger… both in online tutorials, in code bases and of
course in the mentality of the programmers…
Since those "deprecated" idioms are built by combining features
it cannot easily be detected and transformed into "modern" idioms
by a tool either. Whereas a high level dedicated language feature
could more easily be "deprecated" and dealt with in a language
upgrade.
Which is one downside of using library-based constructs over
language constructs.
So I am a bit torn on library vs language features. From an
aesthetics point of view having a small and expressive language
seems like the better choice, but one can make good arguments for
a low level oriented DSL as well.
With a well designed DSL the compiler author might more easily
reason about the programmers intent and perhaps make better
optimization choices… thus allowing the programmer to write more
readable performant code…
I think the DSL approach makes more sense as computer
architecture get less simplistic.
Although currently CPU vendors target C-like code, that might
change in the future as less code is written in C-like languages…
