The current status of D?

[Timon Gehr]

On 12/02/2011 05:57 PM, Jesse Phillips wrote:
> On Fri, 02 Dec 2011 13:25:02 +0100
> Timon Gehr<timon.gehr at gmx.ch>  wrote:
>
>> Its design is not broken and the implementation has almost caught up.
>> (there are some obscure implicit conversions that should be allowed
>> and some that shouldn't that DMD does not get right yet.) Please give
>> objective information (as Jesse Phillips did.)
>
> There isn't a need to be objective. Opinion does give insight into
> things and at times is obviously an opinion. And in fact this is a good
> example of what a meant by "going in blind." There is not implementation
> of D that is complete and trying to use every feature will get you in
> cold water.

Oh it is certainly good to have and communicate opinions. It is just 
that they should be clearly marked as such. I won't even attempt to 
argue that his point of view is not important.

>
> Const is like no other in D, and while it recently got major usability
> improvements it does have its issues. But not using const is possible
> in D and is also easy to get around cast().

It is important to make a cut between what is not supposed to work and 
what is not yet implemented properly. He said 'the _language_ suffers 
from const issues'. And 'its part-broken'. The design is fundamentally 
sound. It could maybe be extended to cover more use cases, but the 
issues with const he addresses have been resolved with inout, and it is 
likely that the implementation will soon be correct.

Also he probably is doing some considerably different stuff than, for 
example, I am, because I don't run into that kind of 
productivity-blocker issues.