Feature suggestion: in-place append to array

[bearophile]

Mike S:

>Well, writing code Java-style is certainly no problem for game devs,<

Right. Here I was talking about D uses more in general, sorry, like young programmers coming out of the university.


>it'll still be a long time before someone actually starts from scratch to write a new kernel using it anyway.<

People will try to use D2 for this purpose too, for example to teaching purposes.


>How difficult do you think that would be for the compiler devs to implement in the semantic sense?  Assuming it can be done without major hardship or compromising the design of the language, that would be really cool.<

They are easy to implement. Even the lazy ones. See ShedSkin "compiler".


>I also noticed a discussion about Python tuples from October 2009 I think, and native tuples in D would also be useful...<

We can talk about them again for D3. At the moment D2 needs less new features and better implementation/debugging of the already present features.


>I think there's a lot to be learned from the expressiveness of scripting languages<

That was one of the original goals of D.


>Are the memory leaks eternal and irrevocable, or are we just talking about memory that takes a long time for the garbage collector to figure out it should free?<

I am mostly talking about false pointers, values that the GC thinks are pointers, while they are not. They can keep alive blocks of memory.


>Assuming people don't just abandon D, it's only a matter of time before the genius programmers of the world fix the rough spots.<

But there are limits in what smart people can invent/solve. So the language designers have to work to allow them to find solutions.

Bye,
bearophile