std.experimental.checkedint is ready for comments!

[tsbockman via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 16 June 2016 at 02:53:38 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
> On 6/15/16 9:34 PM, tsbockman wrote:
>> Why didn't you make your design requirements known at any 
>> earlier point
>> in this process? If you are ultimate gate keeper for Phobos 
>> (as you seem
>> to be), you ought to make your requirements known *before* the
>> implementation is finished.
>
> Apologies about that. I've done a bit of spelunking to see what 
> happened. Indeed the first reference to SafeInt is on a forum 
> post on 6/7/2015, followed immediately by 
> https://github.com/dlang/phobos/pull/3389 which entailed a long 
> discussion.
>
> You first posted about checkedint here on 6/30/2015, in a large 
> thread.
>
> At that time, I had the std.allocator review going on (started 
> on 6/11/2015), a newborn baby, and a move across the continent 
> to worry about (which happened at the end of June). It is 
> entirely possible I just missed that discussion, or more likely 
> saw it and had no meaningful input at the time. There has been 
> a gap in forum posts with "checkedint" in the title between 
> 7/3/2015 and 6/7/2016,

Numerous other mentions were made of this project in various 
contexts on the forums, in GitHub pull requests, and on the bug 
tracker - including discussions in which you participated. 'posts 
with "checkedint" in the title' is too narrow of a search filter.

> so it's not like there was a continuing presence I was working 
> hard to ignore. I honestly think there's nothing to be offended 
> over.

Malicious intent is not required to make the act offensive; 
you're still jumping into a project a year in the making and 
demanding that I choose between investing an additional six 
months (wild guess) of my time working on things I don't care 
about (at best), or canceling the project (which has otherwise 
received generally positive feedback so far).

I am not too upset mostly because I had a variety of reasons for 
pursuing this, not all of which depend on getting it into Phobos.

> This underlies a larger issue. There must be a protocol that 
> guarantees a proposal is brought to consideration to the D 
> leadership. Dicebot is leading such an initiative (which can be 
> seen as a revamping of DIPs) and we hope to get it finalized 
> soon.
>
>
> Andrei

That is part of the problem, but this is also a fine example of a 
broader pattern that I have noticed in D's review process:

Pull requests are routinely reviewed in an upside-down fashion:

1) Formatting
2) Typos
3) Names
4) Tests (and names again)
6) Docs (and names)
8) Design (and more about names)
9) Does this even belong in Phobos?

I don't think people are doing it on purpose - it's just easier 
to start with the trivial nit-picks, because you don't need a 
deep understanding of the code and the problem domain (or 
decision-making authority) to complain about a missing ' ' or 
something.

But, that doesn't change the fact that the process still feels 
almost perfectly designed to waste contributors' time.

Unless the PR is a complete mess, (9) and (8) should be debated 
*first*, before worrying about any of the other stuff. Why waste 
people's time fixing trivialities, if it's all going to just be 
deleted or rewritten anyway?