Vision for the D language - stabilizing complexity?

Jack Stouffer via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Wed Jul 20 13:12:14 PDT 2016


On Tuesday, 19 July 2016 at 15:22:19 UTC, Andrew Godfrey wrote:
> Just like earlier in this thread, where I mentined dfixable 
> breaking changes and Walter implied that even though a would 
> cause people to have to manually rewrite.

Something being dfix-able is not enough for the simple reason 
that legacy code in D is already becoming a thing, despite D2 
only existing for nine years. A complaint has arisen many times 
in the forum and in DConfs that there are many packages on 
code.dlang.org or on Github that don't compile because the author 
stopped maintaining them. In many cases, these repo's have only 
been unmaintained for a year(!) or less, and they already don't 
compile.

There's no way for anyone other than the original author that can 
fix this; all we can do is add a warning on code.dlang.org. All 
the while it reduces the signal to noise ratio of good to bad D 
code online.

Every breakage needs to take into account the baggage of visible 
old code.

There's also the point that there are few changes which can be 
dfix-able (according to its author).


More information about the Digitalmars-d mailing list