D is dead (was: Dicebot on leaving D: It is anarchy driven development in all its glory.)

[Mike Franklin]

On Friday, 24 August 2018 at 04:12:42 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:

> Unless you're trying to argue for folks dropping Phobos, that's 
> just not going to fly. Phobos uses libc heavily, and it really 
> can't do what it needs to do without it (e.g. file operations). 
> Divorcing druntime from libc may help folks focused on embedded 
> development and who don't want to use Phobos, but for most D 
> programs, it really doesn't provide any real benefit to try to 
> make druntime not use libc. So, while such an effort may 
> provide some benefits, I don't see how it could really be for 
> anything other than a niche part of the community.

It's not a problem for Phobos to depend on the C standard 
library.  My goals have to do with making D, the language, 
freestanding (a.k.a nimble-D).

If and when druntime no longer depends on the C standard library, 
the bindings can be moved to a separate repository (e.g. Deimos). 
  A compatibility shim can also be created in a separate 
repository to forward `core.stdc` names to `c.std` or whatever 
name the new repository chooses. That compatibility shim could be 
marked deprecated in favor of the new name, and then many years 
down the line it can be removed (or kept, I don't care).  It then 
becomes part of the toolchain packaging process to add 
Deimos-libc and the compatibility shim to the dmd.conf file and 
include it in the distribution.  Users won't even know it 
happened.  Users's coding in D, the language (no Phobos), will no 
longer have to obtain a C toolchain to generate their binaries.

We're at least half a decade away from any of this, and there's a 
good chance it will never even happen, so don't sweat it.

And about niche use case.  They're niche right now because D 
doesn't provide good support for them, and noone's writing D 
software for them.  If I have my druthers, that's going to 
change, and those use case will become major considerations when 
making language design choices, and it will become obvious that C 
is a more of a liability than an asset.

Mike