no-autodecode -- game plan

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On 8/19/20 4:45 AM, Per Nordlöw wrote:
> On Sunday, 16 August 2020 at 17:00:52 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> TL;DR: I'm working on removing autodecoding from phobos. I have the 
>> first real PR: https://github.com/dlang/phobos/pull/7595
> 
> Will this in the long run affect user-code anyway?

Yes, user code that depends on "xyz".front being dchar will be affected, 
etc. I expect that at some point soon (as I fix modules), we will get to 
a point where no-autodecode phobos is cohesive enough that we can start 
testing other projects. Then we will see the extent of the breakage. I 
don't really want to commit to saying how much there will be. My gut 
tells me there will be little breakages everywhere, but that are easily 
fixed.

Having a straightforward strategy as to how to migrate to 
non-autodecoding phobos would be key to getting this finalized.

> 
> And how will it affect compiled code?

Considering that nearly all "optimizations" that concern autodecode go 
back to treating narrow strings as arrays, I'd say it's going to be a 
net positive in terms of performance.

-Steve