On Wednesday, 7 February 2018 at 16:03:36 UTC, Steven
Schveighoffer wrote:
They are deprecated:
https://dlang.org/changelog/pending.html#hexstrings
https://dlang.org/deprecate.html#Hexstring%20literals
Wow, that's... a little superfluous.
I agree with the notion that the language should be an aggregate
of primitives, and anything that can be composed of those
primitives should be implemented in a library (unless a
compelling reason is found to justify otherwise). The
deprecation of hex string literals has exposed flaws in the
library implementation and the compiler's template
implementation. That doesn't mean deprecation was the wrong
thing to do; it just brings the aforementioned flaws to the
forefront, so let's not shoot the messenger.
Here's a few fundamental flaws I see in our library
implementations.
* Some library implementations are not very cohesive, and have
too many interdependencies. This is what seems to prevent
`HexString` from being used in -betterC.
* Some Phobos implementations would be quite useful in Druntime
and in code that doesn't want to employ the runtime (e.g.
libraries consumed by other languages, resource-constrained
systems, and bare-metal programming), but alas, Druntime can't
have a circular dependency on Phobos (nor should it).
This is a difficult problem, and I don't have any solutions; just
ideas. Maybe Phobos and Druntime should be divided into 3
libraries:
1. A library with no dependencies whatsoever, not even druntime,
c runtime, or the C standard library. Some stuff in
`std.traits`, `std.conv`, and even `HexString` could go here.
Let's call this library DLib.
2. Druntime would only depend on DLib, but never publicly expose
it.
3. Phobos could depend on DLib or Druntime, but again, never
publicly expose it.
4. Phobos could be refactored by identifying packages that have
too much coupling, and factoring out the dependencies into a 3rd,
more cohesive library, imported by the previous two.
For extra credit:
2a. Move C/C++ standard library bindings to Deimos, and have the
desktop OS ports import it privately. There's no reason to
impose this interface on bare-metal ports, and it's a superficial
dependency anyway.
3a. Phobos shouldn't have any dependency on C/C++ language
bindings. DRuntime should expose an idiomatic D (and preferably
@safe) interface for Phobos to use.
DLib could then be used in -betterC and other use cases where
Druntime is more of a liability than an asset.
Mike
