dmd codegen improvements

[Bruno Medeiros via Digitalmars-d]

On 17/09/2015 12:57, Bruno Medeiros wrote:
> But if people from the C++ community said it, OMG, then Walter goes
> "let's add it to D!", just to prove a point or something. *Mind you*:
> all this I'm saying is pre TDPL book stuff. After the book was out,
> things stabilized. But way back, even more so before D2, it would happen
> quite often. Again apologies for no references or examples, but this is
> all stuff from 4-7 years ago so it's hard to remember exact cases.

I do remember though, that the turning point for this was when Andrei 
joined the D team. Before that it was more or less like this:
Walter was the master compiler writer, wohoo, and if someone challenged 
him to add a feature, it went in. In most cases maybe Walter wasn't 
challenged directly, but someone in the C++ community would say "Ha, 
wouldn't it be great if C++ had X!", and then if D didn't had X already, 
it would get added, so Walter would go "Oh, you know what, D has X!!"

Little consideration was given to whether X was worthwhile or not in the 
big picture.

After Andrei came on board, things improved and became more like:
Andrei: "Hold on, first let's see if the use case for X is actually a 
real world need or not. If it is, let's see if it is not satisfactory to 
use existing D language features to solve that use case. And if it's 
not, only then we'll consider adding it. But even so let's try to add X 
in a more generic way, so that it easier to implement and/or so that it 
could solve other use cases as well."

-- 
Bruno Medeiros
https://twitter.com/brunodomedeiros