Final by default?

Andrei Alexandrescu SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org
Wed Mar 12 17:18:03 PDT 2014


On 3/12/14, 5:02 PM, Chris Williams wrote:
> On Wednesday, 12 March 2014 at 22:50:00 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> But we nearly lost a major client over it.
>>
>> We're past the point where we can break everyone's code.
>
> As someone who would like to be able to use D as a language,
> professionally, it's more important to me that D gain future clients
> than that it maintains the ones that it has. Even more important is that
> it does both of those things.

The saying goes, "you can't make a bucket of yogurt without a spoonful 
of rennet". The pattern of resetting customer code into the next version 
must end. It's the one thing that both current and future users want: a 
pattern of stability and reliability.

> I like the idea of having final: and !final:, but I think that compiler
> flags are the right answer for how to approach defaulting final.

Sorry, no. We are opposed to having compiler flags define language 
semantics.


Andrei



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