Dicebot on leaving D: It is anarchy driven development in all its glory.

[Walter Bright]

On 8/25/2018 2:46 PM, David Nadlinger wrote:
> On Saturday, 25 August 2018 at 20:52:06 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>> If I fix the bug, I break existing code, and apparently a substantial amount 
>> of existing code. What's your advice on how to proceed with this?
> 
> At least for the transition period, I'd have attributes only apply to the 
> user-specified code and infer them for the actual full constructor. (We can 
> still print a deprecation warning if they don't match.) —David

Inferring is not good enough, for example:

https://github.com/dlang/dmd/pull/6816#issuecomment-307972790

There the @safe constructor is calling a destructor that calls free(). It can't 
be inferred as @safe. Sure, we can do warnings and deprecations, but the user 
will sooner or later have to change his code, and Chris' code from 2009 is not 
going to compile without changes.

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A further issue with inferring for destructors is that why do it for destructors 
and not other member functions? It's a good question, without obvious answers.

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The larger issue here is there is no solution where someone's ox doesn't get 
gored. I have to make a judgement call on what is overall best for the future of 
D. And the ox gets inevitably gored.

Even C, probably the slowest moving major language, has these issues.