Article on programming language adoption (x-post from /r/programming)

[Walter Bright]

On 8/1/2013 11:07 AM, Tofu Ninja wrote:
> On Thursday, 1 August 2013 at 17:37:51 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> On 8/1/2013 9:53 AM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>>> Y'know, one feature I've always wanted is the equivalent of preprocessed
>>> C code -- with all mixins expanded, aliases substituted with their final
>>> target, templates fully expanded, all syntactic sugar lowered, with the
>>> original code lines in comments, so that you can see exactly how your
>>> code was translated, and whether it matches what you *think* it does.
>>> This would also be invaluable for debugging, as then it will map to the
>>> assembly code much better, which will help you trace where things went
>>> wrong.
>>
>> I do this with a debug build of the compiler. Using --b will give you the
>> expression trees sent to the back end.
>
> Why is this not a feature in the release? Seems like a very useful feature to
> have...

It's for debugging the compiler. It was never designed for general use.