[OT] compiler optimisations

[weaselcat via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 24 April 2015 at 07:04:10 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:
> I find it worrying that so many people attracted to D system 
> level programming are into games, yet game development needs 
> are ignored. That can't win.
>
> D is lucky that Rust is annoying, Go is marginal, and Nim is 
> unknown, so people are stuck with ugly look C++ code.
>

+1 to all of this, D needs better ownership semantics to be 
useful for game development.
Many of the recent improvement requests have felt like ugly hacks 
at best(ref return is useless for classes, not sure if that was 
intended.)

I'm biased because I do essentially zero webdev though, so when I 
see a lot of changes for std.json or text processing, I don't get 
too excited. D has a lot of sugar but missing many essential 
things you'd expect if you want to compete with C++.

for example, typecons.unique has been in an unusable state for... 
ever? It's just another one of those things in D that feels like 
it will never be finished. It's hard to attract people to a 
language then tell them they need to fix the standard library if 
they want to use it. I'm aware that work is being done on master, 
but it's just one example(and there's tons of blockers...)

> There is a need to move towards something beautiful, and that's 
> not in Andrei's vision, but in the original D1 vision + the 
> improvements proposed by Bearophile, Timon Gehr and others. Or 
> swing 100% to Andrei's direction and improve significantly on 
> meta programming by adding pattern matching and partial 
> evaluation, so that you have something significantly better 
> than C++.

I think pattern matching and better meta programming in general 
would make the language better either way.

C++ has mach7 for pattern matching, all done in metaprogramming 
AFAIK. I doubt anything like that could be done in D without 
being far uglier.