D community's view on syntactic sugar

[Sjoerd Nijboer]

On Sunday, 17 June 2018 at 16:52:59 UTC, Neia Neutuladh wrote:
I agree with you for the whole bunch.

Except this one
> allocator.make!Foo(args)
> new!allocator Foo(args)
>
> One character difference. Doesn't seem like a big deal.

new is a keyword in D right now which gcallocs an object and 
emplaces a T on top of it.
make does thesame thing, but you can pass it any allocator you 
want.
allocating and emplacing a type is so often done that you might 
want a keyword for it.
Why not unify these two?
Seems like there's now a duplicate way to do thesame thing in the 
language standard.
Even worse, new has a strictly defined meaning accross a lot of 
languages, while make doesn't.
Its just an oddity right now.

But my biggest reason to unify it is to do something different, 
introducing a feature where one could get the allocator with 
which the current class has been instantiated, and allow the 
current class to allocate and conditional deallocate if 
neccesarily with that one. This would allow gc code to be @nogc 
depending on the used allocator. Overloading `new` for this, and 
retaining the default behaviour would allow current code to be 
relatively easily converted, and for gc allocator dependant 
libraries a calculated find and replace would allow conversion to 
different gc allocators... but that's a different story. (Mainly 
just an idealistic wish from me.)


My main reason to start this threat was to see if there was 
spirit to add syntactic sugar as a language feature.
And it quite provided in that goal.
While adding sugar as libraries using mixins isn't my preference 
and as far as I think should be used as a last resort, it is 
something I haven't explored before.
I also understand that some things aren't neccesarily good 
candidates of syntactic sugars, but these were some examples I 
could come up with quite easily at the time.

All with all I like D and the community for the level of talk 
behind the language design.
It is something I haven't seen before around a language quite 
like this. :)