What are the worst parts of D?

[H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d]

On Thu, Sep 25, 2014 at 09:19:29PM +0000, via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Thursday, 25 September 2014 at 21:03:53 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
[...]
> >I have yet to completely convince Andrei that autodecoding is a bad
> >idea :-(

It certainly represents a runtime overhead, which may be non-negligible
depending on your particular use case, and despite oft stated benefits
of being Unicode-aware by default (well, not 100%), I think the cost of
maintaining special-casing for narrow strings is starting to show up in
the uglification of Phobos range-based code. Ranges were supposed to
help with writing cleaner, more generic code, but I've been observing a
trend of special-casing in order to reduce the autodecoding overhead in
string handling, which somewhat reduces the cleanness of otherwise
fully-generic code.  This complexity has led to string-related bugs, and
definitely has a cost on the readability (and, consequently,
maintainability) of Phobos code. Special cases hurt generic code. It's
not just about performance.


> I think it should just refuse to work on char[], wchar[] and dchar[].
> Instead, byCodeUnit, byCodePoint (which already exist) would be
> required.  This way, users would need to make a conscious decision,
> and there would be no surprises and no negative performance impact.

Not a bad idea. If we do it right, we could (mostly) avoid user outrage.
E.g., start with a "soft deprecation" (a compile-time message, but not
an actual warning, to the effect that byCodeUnit / byCodePoint should be
used with strings from now on), then a warning, then an actual
deprecation, then remove autodecoding code from Phobos algorithms
(leaving only byCodePoint for those who still want autodecoding).


T

-- 
Two wrongs don't make a right; but three rights do make a left...