mixin + CTFE, to big a hammer??

[John Reimer]

On Thu, 01 Mar 2007 13:29:30 -0700, Hasan Aljudy wrote:

> kris wrote:
>> BCS wrote:
>>> I have been thinking about the new functionality added by the code 
>>> mixin and CTFE features and I'm thinking that they may be "to big a 
>>> hammer" for may jobs.
>>>
>>> Take my parser generator as an example. I don't think there would be 
>>> anything to gain by using mixin as the primary method of code 
>>> generation. Firstly, code generated this way will inherently be harder 
>>> to read and debug. Also it doesn't do anything that tuple iteration 
>>> doesn't do just as well.
>>>
>>> I will admit that there may be some things to be gained there by using 
>>> mixin code (the terminal and action call backs could benefit a lot 
>>> from this) but these are only minor changes. Also mixin code would be 
>>> invaluable for some more complicated cases.
>>>
>>> Why is this important? I think that many valuable types of code 
>>> generation would benefit more by improving the static control 
>>> structures (foreach/if/etc.) than they would from more mixin like 
>>> features.
>>>
>>> One feature I would like is a true static foreach, one that can 
>>> iterate over any built in type arrays or a tuple but does unrolling 
>>> and per-loop semantic analysis like with tuples. This, in conjunction 
>>> with CTFE, would make for huge improvements in what can readily be 
>>> accomplished by moving much of the processing of the code generator 
>>> input into function and out of templates.
>>>
>>> Basically, I'm saying that while mixin+CTFE is good from many things, 
>>> it shouldn't be pushed at the expense of the more mundane techniques.
>>>
>>> Just some thoughts, what do you all think?
>> 
>> 
>> D mixin, in it's current guise, is about equivalent to crack-cocaine. 
>> Easily the worst thing that happened to the language, IMO.
>> 
>> Just say no
> 
> Just give it time, wait for it to mature from experience.

??

It's been around for a bit already. It doesn't seem to be getting better?

-JJR