Generality creep

[9il]

On Tuesday, 19 March 2019 at 02:52:34 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
> Walter and I were looking at indexOf in the standard library.
>
> What's the moral of the story here? Generality is good, but it 
> seems in several places in phobos (of which this is just one 
> example), a combination of vague specification and aiming for a 
> nice ideal of "work with anything remotely reasonable" has 
> backfired into a morass of inconsistently defined and supported 
> corner cases.
>

Phobos looks too generalized for me and not enough standardized. 
For (well known) example, min/max functions for integers. Both 
for security and safety reasons it is better to raise a 
compile-time error rather than to implement clever signity-aware 
comparison. I did this in Mir. There a lot of such small nitpicks 
but their reimplementation make life either for middle size and 
large projects. It would be nice to have well-standardized 
generic building blocks like `mir`/`max` in Phobos with 
verifiable BetterC availability.

Best,
Ilya