Newbie initial comments on D language - scope

[Michel Fortin]

On 2008-02-05 23:45:42 -0500, Edward Diener 
<eddielee_no_spam_here at tropicsoft.com> said:

> I love it when people such as you carry on about all the work that must 
> be done to implement X. Implementing any new feature in any language 
> takes work. There are NO free rides. But that never means that the new 
> feature should not be done.

If by "work that must be done" you mean find a solution with no 
overhead, then good luck. I'm telling you it'll be difficult to 
implement, I'm telling you it's going to remove one of the biggest 
advantage of using a garbage collector by producing more code to deal 
with reference counts and object allocation/deallocation, and this code 
will consume time.

In other word, I'm arguing about the (undesirable) end result, not the 
work it'd take to get there.


> Who cares if some program is slowed down by some number of 
> microsecoonds each time if the feature makes a better and much easier 
> programming paradigm work which otherwise could only be handled in a 
> clumsy and inefficient manner.

Well, you have a valid point that often -- though not always -- a 
feature that, at the sacrifice of some runtime performance, help 
programmers save time is a good thing. I'll have to admit I'm not too 
convinced it'd be so helpful there, but that's not really what is 
concerning me.

One of D's goals is performance. The thing with performance in a 
program is that you don't need it, except at a few critical places 
where it is of the uttermost importance. By forcing the 
reference-counting code everywhere, it's going to end up at many places 
were it's not needed, and some of these places will be those 
time-critical parts.

-- 
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.com
http://michelf.com/