does D already have too many language features ?

[Mike Franklin]

On Monday, 8 April 2019 at 11:22:49 UTC, Atila Neves wrote:

> I'd do away with classes and OOP, but to call that divisive 
> would be an understatement.

Yeah it's a controversial one.  I also would support removing 
classes and interfaces from the language, but *only* if they 
could be implemented in a library.  Interestingly, as 
demonstrated here 
(https://theartofmachinery.com/2018/08/13/inheritance_and_polymorphism_2.html) it's almost there.

Zig and Rust have shown that structs are enough of an object 
system. Pointers and `ref` are enough for reference type 
semantics. Mix in D's design by introspection(DbI) features, 
`alias this`, `mixin`s, etc. and we're 70% there. Due to DbI, 
interfaces could probably go away today.

I'm looking forward to hearing the proposal around ProtoObject at 
DConf, but I would suggest looking for language features that 
would make ProtoObject unnecessary.

Mike