D popularity

[monarch_dodra]

On Monday, 21 January 2013 at 17:56:05 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 05:32:12PM +0100, monarch_dodra wrote:
>> The only thing holding me back from D is that it is 
>> unreliable. I'm
>> not just talking about bugs in Phobos (which can easilly found 
>> and/or
>> fixed).
>> 
>> I'm talking about all the unreliable voldemort structs, the 
>> context
>> pointers, the delegates, the destructor sequences, memory 
>> management
>> and whatnot.
>
> Oh? What's so unreliable about delegates? I find that they work 
> quite
> well in general.
>
> [SNIP]
>
> T

I've stayed away from them mostly, so I may be unfair, but I'm 
mostly thinking about delegates that reference external data via 
context pointers.

Come to think about it, everything I dislike about about D always 
boils down to "context pointer". That thing is so scary unsafe, 
and can so easily back fire on you :(

I don't have the hindsight yet to be allowed to declare it was a 
terrible idea, but that's what I'm thinking right now.

Heck, I'm kind of wishing we had a compiler switch to ban and/or 
warn on such usage. Or at least, make them explicit opt-ins for 
crying out loud.