Another idiom I wish were gone from phobos/druntime

[via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 6 February 2015 at 10:08:29 UTC, bearophile wrote:
> That seems a bit too much for the average human to handle :-)
> Sometimes features help, but that list seems excessive for a 
> language that is not meant for high integrity systems as D.

So D has to decide what development scenario it wants to compete 
in. There are advanced competitive alternatives for specific 
system development scenarios with C-like performance.

A wide partial feature set only impress programmers who don't 
know the field, but underwhelm those who actually look for a 
particular feature set. Having 70% coverage of what the 
competitors provide for a development scenario is not good enough.

D feature set currently does not cut it in:

- interactive/realtime
- low memory usage/manual memory management
- numeric analysis/SIMD
- verification
- high concurrency/low latency
- dataflow/reactive
- hardware programming/no runtime/intrinsics
- system integration (xml etc)
- rapid prototyping
- native gui applications

So where is D going to make a dent? If you want safer C-like 
programming you are up against:

- various C platforms/tooling
- C++14, advanced tooling (analysis, instrumentation), MPX
- Ada/SPARK 2014
- Rust

If @safe/@trusted/@system is not the main selling point for D 
then it has to provide one of the others. E.g. easy SIMD, 
unique_ptr style memory management etc.