D community's view on syntactic sugar

[Dmitry Olshansky]

On Friday, 15 June 2018 at 23:04:40 UTC, Sjoerd Nijboer wrote:
> For someone coming from a C# background there is some seemingly 
> simple syntactic sugar missing from D.
>

First of all, it’s not missing but deliberately not added for 
many reason, which I’m sure other folks from core team will 
provide and correct me where applicable.

> * The null conditional operator `?.`

Might be interesting but we need to try more principled approach 
alng the line of Option!T type with nice accessors and maybe even 
make non-null a default. The latter will take not a single year 
though. But peppering language with more built-in magic is not 
our direction, I’m pretty certain of that.

> * Something like a `yield return` statement for coroutines.

That was on the radar actually, and would encode stackless 
automation wrapped as InputRange. Problem is how to get it to be 
say forward range (i.e. state saving would really be nice to 
include). For stackfull we have std.concurrency.Generator in 
library code just fine (IIRC).

> T* he `async` & `await` keyword from C# make proactor pattern 
> async code extremely easy to reason about.

God please no. Look at Go’s popularity because of dead simple go 
routines and “async i/o is transparent and looks blocking but 
ain’t so”. We have at least vibe.d for that and possibly more. 
Also see Java doing fibers recently, and Kotlin did them just a 
year or so back. People love fibers and mostly dislike 
Futers/explicit async, and plain callbacks are obvious last 
resort that nobody likes.

‘async’ is viral keywords that poorly scales, I worked on Dart 
core team and even they admitted this problem is not solved well.

> * a good syntax for properties so there's less code bloat.
> * replacing `Allocator.make()` with `new!Allocator`. After all 
> `new` can be concidered as just a wrapper around the standard 
> GC allocator. Why can't we just have a special template of it?

Is  a good idea, but syntactic sugar is smallest part of this 
problem if at all.

>
> I have realized that I have become quite dependant on syntactic 
> sugar to the point that it severely impacts my productivity 
> when I work whitout. And these ones are my biggest obstacles 
> when I try to work with D from a C# experience.

Yeah it won’t be smooth then I could see.

> I think that C# really nailed down some of these particular 
> examples except the last one of course.
> And I also think D could do a better job of embracing 
> productivity through supporting syntax of common tasks and 
> borrow from other languages in that regard.
>
> But the most important question is how other people feel about 
> that.
> If people hate syntactic sugar D will never become that gem for 
> me that I would like it to be. But if key people want it, it 
> one day might.