Feedback on Átila's Vision for D

[bpr]

On Thursday, 24 October 2019 at 12:35:43 UTC, Radu wrote:
> On Tuesday, 15 October 2019 at 13:09:15 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
>> This thread is for general feedback and discussion regarding 
>> Átila's blog post on his vision for D's future.
>>
>> https://dlang.org/blog/2019/10/15/my-vision-of-ds-future/
> ...

That's terrific feedback, a critique with actionable items drawn 
from experience.

I agree and share that experience, namely, I'm very positive 
about betterC, but there are many rough edges (yes, especially 
CTFE and missing library features) and I doubt I'd recommend it 
in it's current state for "real work" against the alternatives.

> All these problems are systemic and come from the lack of 
> orthogonality in the core and std libs, the language had some 
> improvements in using a template based run-time interface, but 
> still has warts like no betterC CTFE. There are a lot of 
> assumptions about what is available in terms of language and 
> run-time, and vast majority of APIs in std lib is written with 
> RTTI, exceptions and GC in mind.
> In a perfect world core/std APIs will be layered bottom-up, so 
> you have access to some (most?) algorithms and data structures 
> from the lower denominator (betterC) till up the chain with GC, 
> exceptions, type info where it makes sense.
> It's the "pay as you go" mindset, that was discussed at length 
> on this forum, that is not a reality yet.

That's the vision I could get behind. I think there are many on 
this list who have an aversion to this vision though, so I'm 
skeptical that it will happen anytime soon.