Parallel execution of unittests

[Jason Spencer via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 1 May 2014 at 21:40:38 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
> I'll be blunt. What you say is technically sound (which is 
> probably why you believe it is notable)...

Well, I suppose that's not the MOST insulting brush-off I could 
hope for, but it falls short of encouraging me to contribute 
ideas for the improvement of the language.

I'll just add this:  I happen to introduce a colleague to the D 
webpage the other day, and ran across this in the overview: "D 
... doesn't come with a VM, a religion, or an overriding 
philosophy. It's a practical language for practical programmers 
who need to get the job done quickly, reliably, and leave behind 
maintainable, easy to understand code."  This business that only 
inherently parallel tests that never access disk, share setup, 
etc. are TRUE unit tests smack much more of religion than 
pragmatism.  Indeed, phobos demonstrates that sometimes, the 
practical thing to do is to violate these normally good rules.

Another overriding principle of D is that the easy thing to do 
should be the safe thing to do, and dangerous things should take 
some work.  I don't see that reflected in the proposal to turn 
parallelism on by default.  This seems like a time bomb waiting 
to go off on unsuspecting acolytes of the cult of 
inherently-parallel-tests-onlyism.

If we don't want to consider how we can accommodate both camps 
here, then I must at least support Jonathan's modest suggestion 
that parallel UTs require active engagement rather than being the 
default.