Phobos - breaking existing code

[via Digitalmars-d]

On Saturday, 29 November 2014 at 11:37:52 UTC, bearophile wrote:
> Some of this "hibernation" could be caused by the latest 
> "revolution" threads by Andrei. But probably there are also 
> other causes.
>
> Or perhaps I'm just mis-measuring the kind of D activity, and 
> everything is going on as well as usual :-)

I got very happy when Walter announced "@nogc" and his intent to 
create a "better C" switch on the compiler.

I felt this was a nice change of direction, but I also feel that 
this direction has stagnated and taken a turn for the worse with 
the ref-counting focus… Phobos is too much of a 
scripting-language library to me, too much like Tango, and 
hacking in ref counting makes it even more so.

To me, a "better C" would have a minimal runtime, a tight 
minimalistic standard library and very simple builtin ownership 
semantics (uniqe_ptr). Then a set of supporting libraries that 
are hardware-optimized (with varying degree of portability).

However, I think those that are interested in D as a tight system 
level language have to spec out "better C" themselves as a formal 
language spec sketch. I'd be happy to contribute to that, maybe 
we could start a wiki-page. Since a "better C" would break 
existing code, it would allow a more "idealistic" language design 
discussion. I think that could cut down on the noise.

I think an experiment would be worth it.