removal of cruft from D

[Pelle Månsson]

Bill Baxter wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 12:04 PM, Pelle M�nsson <pelle.mansson at gmail.com> wrote:
>> dsimcha wrote:
>>> == Quote from retard (re at tard.com.invalid)'s article
>>>> Mon, 23 Nov 2009 17:14:54 +0000, dsimcha wrote:
>>>> [snip]
>>>>> as opposed to the
>>>>> Java way of having to use 5 different classes just to read in a file
>>>>> line by line in the default character encoding.
>>>> That's a library issue. Has nothing to do with the language.
>>> I agree completely, but for all practical purposes basic parts of the
>>> standard
>>> library that are used by almost everyone are part of the language. �Heck,
>>> in many
>>> languages (D being one of them) you can't even write a canonical hello
>>> world
>>> program w/o the standard lib.
>> Sure you can!
>>
>> extern (C) int puts(char *);
>> void main() {
>> � �puts("Hello world!\0".dup.ptr);
>> }
> 
> I think he means that the GC from the standard lib will still be there
> to perform that .dup for you.
> (You don't need the dup though, btw, string literals are null
> terminated and can be passed to C funcs as-is).
> 
> Even without that, the GC doesn't get eliminated from executables just
> because you don't use it.
> There's still some hidden calls to gc init routines that go into any D exe.
> 
> --bb
Fair enough. :) I do think I need the dup, though, since the literal is 
immutable otherwise.

I lean more towards that the standard libs are a core part of the 
language anyway, and the possibility of writing your own simplifications 
doesn't help the usefulness of the language.