GCC 4.6

Walter Bright newshound2 at digitalmars.com
Wed Nov 24 15:25:26 PST 2010


Emil Madsen wrote:
> And yea, bearophile brings up a lot of nice features, and Walter would 
> never have a chance to implement all of them himself, which might be 
> good, if everything bearophile suggests got into the language, we would 
> have this major language noone would ever be able to learn, nor use. 
> However, if we succeed in implementing the best ideas I do think we'll 
> end up with a superb output, however I do think we need to discuss a lot 
> of issues and features, and thats why I love bearophiles postings, 
> simply because it gives the community a lot to discuss.
> 
> Just my opinion. - But I do think discussing a lot of features, even the 
> ones not really related, will help out the language in the end.

I think bearophile does a valuable service to us by bringing up discussion topics.

My gripe is when he lists things that he wishes D did when D already does them 
and has for years. Case in point: D imports. It's irksome when he often writes 
from the perspective of assuming that D does it wrong while other languages are 
assumed to do it right. Case in point: design by contract, and his assumption 
that dmd was a primitive compiler that did not do data flow analysis while 
praising llvm's.

My concern about that is that with the volume of his posts, I will miss some of 
them, and people inexperienced with D will presume those mistakes and 
misunderstandings are correct.

I have no issue at all with bringing up factual shortcomings of D, even when I 
disagree about whether they are actual shortcomings or not. For example, it is a 
fact that D does not check for integer arithmetic overflow. Whether that's a 
problem or not is a fine topic for discussion.


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