On 02/11/2018 08:27 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
On 2/11/2018 5:05 PM, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) wrote:
That's the same exact reason most languages don't have most of the
nice things in D, like separators for numeric literals: Because
they're not strictly necessary. But if D had never been willing to
improve the state of the art by not being afraid of "not stricktly
necessary" features, very few of us would have ever had reson to come
onboard with D in the first place. And yes, I know D's not at that
point any more. And that's one of my biggest dissapointments with D.
D is already a very large language. There's got to be a point where some
pruning makes for a better language. Adding more and more lightweight
features for 0.1% use cases when we neglect heavyweight features for 30%
use cases is not where we should be shooting our arrows.
Know what is a heavyweight problem worth our while? Having dmd be able
to directly read C .h files, so the poor user does not have to manually
translate them.
We've already got a huge chunk of that problem solved. The Digital Mars
C/C++ front end is now Boost licensed. It can be used. It's already been
converted to D! The preprocessor in it is a bit dated and a bit too
specific to Windows - but we've got Warp now!
Replace the preprocessor in dmc++ with Warp, slice off the back end, and
make it a module that dmd can import.
Wouldn't it be nice to support:
import stdio.h; // Look, Ma! C headers!
There are some intractable issues, and it may be impossible to get 100%
to "it just works", but looking past that it might be a huge win for us.
And, let's not forget working on ref counting.
Definitely all very cool stuff, no argument here. But for smaller things
it would still be nice to hear something closer to:
"That's a reasonable point and a would be a nice touch, and it doesn't
impact other things. Andrei and I, naturally, can't dedicate any of our
resources to it because we have more crutial priorities on our plates,
but we wouldn't necessarily veto a quality implementation."
instead of:
"It's not one of the big-picture items for D therefore it doesn't belong
in D"
Though I do realize that's not likely to happen. It's not as if I'm
saying "hey, go do this". All I'm really saying is "I like this idea,
I'm in favor of it, and it's worth being open to." Not much more than that.
