What would a minimal subset of D look like?

[Mike Franklin]

On Saturday, 22 June 2019 at 09:03:42 UTC, Ola Fosheim Grøstad 
wrote:

> The wording "newbie" was unfortunate, I meant for some new to 
> the language, but not new to embedded programming.  So we could 
> assume that they know a language for embedded programming like 
> C, C++ or Rust already.
>
>
> What are the essential features?  Or, which ones are less 
> essential, e.g. I don't really see the need for hex strings, 
> but maybe they are very useful to others.
>
> Maybe this is a better phrasing: how simple can D be made 
> without feeling limited when doing embedded programming or low 
> level systems programming?

I could get by with structs, basic types, functions, and typical 
flow-control features of any language.  I wouldn't enjoy it, 
though, for anything complex.  When things start getting complex, 
that's when I want to be able to utilize the modeling and 
metaprogramming features of a language.  So the features I would 
prefer would probably depend greatly on the complexity of the 
project I was working on and the resource constraints of the 
platform.

That is why I think the opt-in continuum 
(https://forum.dlang.org/post/q7j4sl$17pe$1@digitalmars.com) that 
Andrei mentioned a while back is so important.  It allows one to 
scale up with the complexity of the project and/or the available 
resources of the platform.

Mike