Does D have too many features?

[David Nadlinger]

On Monday, 30 April 2012 at 03:16:09 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 29, 2012 at 02:26:12PM +0200, David Nadlinger wrote:
>> […]
>>  - Built-in arrays and AAs: They are convenient to use, but as 
>> far as
>>  I can see the single biggest GC dependency in the language. 
>> Why not
>>  lower array and AA literals to expression tuples (or 
>> whatever) to
>>  make the convenient syntax usable with custom (possibly 
>> non-GC safe)
>>  containers as well? A GC'd default implementation could then 
>> be
>>  provided in druntime, just like today's arrays and AAs.
> [...]
>
> AA's are moving into druntime. Yours truly is supposed to make 
> that
> happen eventually, but lately time hasn't been on my side. :-/

This moves the _implementation_ to druntime, but there is still 
realistically no way to use AA literals with my own non-GC'd 
version of hash maps without shipping a custom druntime (and thus 
modifying the semantics of an existing language construct). What 
I'm talking about would let you do things like

MyVector!int stuff = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5];

without needing a (temporary) GC'd allocation, and thus please 
the GC-hater crowd because they can still have all the syntax 
candy with their own containers, even if they can't resp. don't 
want to use the default GC'd constructs.

David