Official DMD compiler written in D

[Rob T]

On Thursday, 10 January 2013 at 22:18:08 UTC, Era Scarecrow wrote:
> On Thursday, 10 January 2013 at 22:02:17 UTC, Dmitry Olshansky 
> wrote:
>> + user defined implicit conversion so that AALiteral(K,V) 
>> --*implicitly*!--> AA!(K,V)
>>
>>
>> The other use case for user-defined implicit conversion were 
>> already outlined before so I hope it will make its way in one 
>> day.
>
>  I thought I heard talk of possibly moving AA's to a library 
> implementation rather than a built in feature (Still 'built in' 
> technically).

I was wondering the same thing: Why do AA's have to be built 
directly into the language rather than implemented within the 
standard library?

AA's may be nice to have, but are they really all that 
fundamental? For example, everyone uses strings, but I suspect 
not everyone will use AA's.

It could however be that some fundamental constructs in the D 
language make use of the built in AA's (tuples?), so if that is 
the case I can understand why they would be built in, but I do 
not know if this is the case or not.

On a side note, I'm wondering if this may be a way that can help 
decide what should or should not be made a built in component of 
the language, i.e, If the language itself can make good use of 
the feature internally, then it's a good candidate for being 
built in, but if not, then it's a good candidate for being left 
out and instead implemented in the std lib or elsewhere.

--rt