D Language Foundation January 2023 Quarterly Meeting Summary

[bachmeier]

On Monday, 27 February 2023 at 10:47:04 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:

> Razvan [submitted a PR deprecating `alias this` in 
> classes](https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/14812) the next day. 
> Amaury [initiated a forum 
> discussion](https://forum.dlang.org/thread/roaaoujwgkzednetbndp@forum.dlang.org) a few days later.

Is there a replacement? If not, why is this even being discussed? 
I'm all for breaking changes if there's a benefit and an easy 
path to maintain the existing functionality. This fails on both 
counts. If you want to enforce that it's not used, add a flag, 
but don't take it away just for the sake of taking it away.

> Martin suggested a fourth option: phase out `-betterC` because 
> it's a "pile of hacks". Dennis considered that but thought 
> BetterC users would not be happy when it gets deprecated 
> without a suitable replacement.

If you don't like BetterC, don't use BetterC. It *already* 
requires a flag.

More generally, deprecation decisions like this shouldn't be made 
by a small group of people that write a tiny percentage of the D 
code running in the real world. That same process gave us a safe 
by default proposal that would have made it impossible to 
interoperate with C code.