Evolving the D Language

[Nick Treleaven]

On Friday, 7 July 2023 at 10:45:33 UTC, Guillaume Piolat wrote:
> alias this was a relatively bad idea, even if an iconic feature.
> I don't remember people from outside the community being 
> impressed by alias this.

There was no way to rewrite the code without breaking dependent 
code. That should not happen with a routine compiler release.

> We have the right to backtrack on bad ideas instead of keeping 
> them forever.

Marking a feature as obsolete doesn't mean it has to be supported 
forever. Presumably at some point support will be dropped. 
Possibly obsolete features could become deprecations before they 
are actually removed.

> The current deprecation system is very good.

For something like alias this in classes, making it obsolete 
instead of deprecated signals that the feature won't be removed 
in 20 months (based on a 2-month release cycle, 10 release 
deprecation cycle as standard).