Blog post: What D got wrong

[Atila Neves]

On Thursday, 13 December 2018 at 09:40:45 UTC, RazvanN wrote:
> On Tuesday, 11 December 2018 at 10:45:39 UTC, Atila Neves wrote:
>> A few things that have annoyed me about writing D lately:
>>
>> https://atilanevesoncode.wordpress.com/2018/12/11/what-d-got-wrong/
>
> That was a really good blog post, however I am strongly against 
> the following sentence:
>
> "I think there’s a general consensus that @safe, pure and 
> immutable should be default."
>
> It's not at all a general consensus and doing this would 
> literally break all the existing D code. Without discussing all 
> the technical aspects, this will severely impact the adoption 
> rate of D because it will make it very complicated for people 
> coming from a C/C++/Java background to accommodate with the 
> language. In addition, this is completely against D's liberal 
> philosophy where you can program however you want.

My impression is that it's a consensus that it _should_, but it's 
not going to happen due to breaking existing code.

> this will severely impact the adoption rate of D because it 
> will make it very complicated for people coming from a 
> C/C++/Java background to accommodate with the language

How? Rust has immutable and safe by default and it's doing fine.

> this is completely against D's liberal philosophy where you can 
> program however you want.

It would be if the change weren't accompanied by adding `impure` 
and some sort of mutable auto. @system already exists. It's a 
question of opting out (like with variable initialisation) 
instead of opting in.