Is @safe still a work-in-progress?

Nicholas Wilson iamthewilsonator at hotmail.com
Wed Aug 29 13:53:42 UTC 2018


On Wednesday, 29 August 2018 at 08:35:30 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 8/28/2018 10:18 PM, Nicholas Wilson wrote:
>> Bugzilla is not documentation. These are language changes they 
>> need to be in release notes and the spec.
>
> You asked for a clue: "we have no clue WTF its supposed to do 
> or why the changes are being made" and there it is. There are 
> no barriers to reviewing the idea nor the implementation.

I don't know how much more blunt I can be while still being 
professional about it:
_this must be documented properly_. This is not just about us 
reviewing it, this is also about people using it.

Think about it this way: I'm a new user and I hear that D is 
supposed to be memory safe.

Am I going to trawl through bugzilla to find about the features 
of this memory safety?

Suppose I do a search for "dlang memory safety" on how I can use 
this feature. What does a search bring up?

First hit: https://dlang.org/spec/memory-safe-d.html
Gives me a link to https://dlang.org/articles/safed.html, not 
very helpful, and to
  @system/@safe/@trusted, that tells me a bunch of things I'm not 
allowed to do in safe code.

Second hit: 
https://dlang.org/blog/2016/09/28/how-to-write-trusted-code-in-d/
More (admittedly better) info on @system/@safe/@trusted

Third Hit: 
https://forum.dlang.org/thread/ofkjuq$or6$1@digitalmars.com welp 
the forum is down, next!

Fourth hit: https://wiki.dlang.org/Memory_Management

Fifth hit: https://dconf.org/2017/talks/bright.pdf
Some stuff about scope, possibly not up to date(!).

Sixth hit is Adam Ruppe's fork of the spec page on memory safety

Seventh is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12391370

Number 8: https://www.meetup.com/en-AU/SeaLang/events/246692611/

9: 
https://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/6b4xrc/walter_bright_believes_memory_safety_will_kill_c/

10: is the Wikipdia page on D.

Searching for "dlang scope" brings up scope(exit) & friends and 
some old forum posts  including 
https://forum.dlang.org/thread/obfftm$2m3j$1@digitalmars.com 
which feels like déjà vu, followed by a bunch of irrelevant links 
to various parts of the spec.

That was on a not anonymous search, I know precisely what I'm 
looking for, and the closest thing I found was 4/5ths the way 
down a 42 slide PDF with no annotations from a year ago.

Even someone relatively familiar is going to look at the spec and 
the changelog, and they're not going to find anything BECAUSE ITS 
NOT THERE! You know where it is? Bugzilla, because that's where 
Walter thinks documentation should go.





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