http://wiki.dlang.org/DIP25

[Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d]

On 1/2/2015 2:38 PM, Joseph Rushton Wakeling via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On 02/01/15 22:16, Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> I don't believe it is impossible to implement in D, in fact, Bartosz Milewski
>> proposed such a system some years back. I do believe that people will simply
>> reject such a system as too hard to use.
>
> Isn't that dependent on the use-case, though?  We know very well that games
> programmers (for example) will jump through programming fire, compared to many
> other developers, in order to achieve their desired results.

Take a look at noted game developer Jonathan Blow's videos. They'll jump through 
hoops for performance, but I see little evidence they will do so for 
correctness. It's like have a nun stand over you and rap your knuckles every 
time your handwriting isn't perfect. Nobody likes that.


> Assuming that we're not going to lose the default case of the GC being
> responsible for allocation/ownership unless the programmer specifies otherwise,
> what's wrong with having a rigorous ownership system in place that can be made
> use of if and only if the programmer sees value in it?

Because of the viral nature of it, you cannot avoid it. It's like trying to 
avoid using const.


>> For a topical example, check out the threads here on the Ddoc syntax. Many have
>> strongly argued against the simple, general, powerful and orthogonal macro
>> syntax in favor of an idiosyncratic mass of special cases. It's classic.
>
> OK, tongue in cheek time, but if simple, powerful and orthogonal is the goal,
> why are we messing around with this D stuff instead of just writing everything
> in Lisp? ;-)

Exactly.


> I hope it's obvious what I'm getting at here -- a really simple, general and
> powerful syntax can become horrendously complicated to deal with once you start
> going beyond a certain scale of combinations.

Don't I know it :-)