Future of D

[Max Haughton]

On Sunday, 13 December 2020 at 22:53:31 UTC, Paul Backus wrote:
> On Sunday, 13 December 2020 at 22:41:36 UTC, IGotD- wrote:
>> On Sunday, 13 December 2020 at 22:26:55 UTC, Paul Backus wrote:
>>>
>>> This is never going to happen. It's too big of a breaking 
>>> change.
>>
>> I'm afraid of that. No pain no glory.
>
> It's easy to sit around in our armchairs pontificating about 
> how, if only "the D community" (read: someone else) would do X, 
> Y, or Z, all of our problems would be solved.
>
> It's harder, but ultimately much more rewarding, to roll up 
> one's sleeves and actually make a positive contribution.

Positive contribution to what? Do we really have a grand strategy 
as a language at the moment? Obviously the language ecosystem can 
always be improved but the language itself is more subtle.

We know what we want (e.g. take memory safety for an example), 
but doing it requires coordination. The DIP system seems to work 
pretty well, but it encourages incremental work which isn't 
necessarily ideal for something big (like borrowing) - this 
doesn't necessarily imply breaking things but it would mean new 
syntax which (speaking for myself personally) I don't really have 
the confidence to try and propose by myself.

FWIW, we might benefit from having working groups a la the C++ 
committee. I'd happily contribute to one on memory safety (I 
would say I'd start one but I dont trust my knowledge of either 
DMD internals or formal proofs of this kind of theory).