Lots of low hanging fruit in Phobos

[Timon Gehr]

On 03/08/2014 02:09 AM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 08, 2014 at 01:14:29AM +0100, Timon Gehr wrote:
>> On 03/07/2014 02:37 AM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>>> Unfortunately, input ranges are somewhat tedious to write -- nice
>>> foreach loops have to be broken up into .empty, .front, .popFront,
>>> which is a lot of boilerplate code and not so nice in inner loops
>>> (though I suppose the idea is to improve compiler inlining to handle
>>> these cases).
>>
>> I think that the separation of front and popFront causes much of this.
>
> I'm on the fence about that one. On the one hand, some ranges that do
> complex calculations in .front are better off with .popAndReturnFront.
> But on the other hand, there are also algorithms for which you don't
> want to advance the range just to pick off its front element. Since the
> separated semantics can't be achieved with a non-separated range API, I
> lean slightly towards favoring the current split approach.
> ...

I agree that there are trade-offs involved.

> Having a way to auto-generate input range boilerplate, though, would be
> really, *really* nice. Coroutine-style code would be ideal.
> ...

The drawback is that without the compiler being really clever, ranges 
thus defined will be just input ranges.