DIP 1031--Deprecate Brace-Style Struct Initializers--Community Review Round 1 Discussion

[Walter Bright]

On 2/15/2020 10:27 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> What's the point of lightning fast generation of poor quality code?

The speed of the code generated was competitive with (and sometimes ahead of) 
the other compilers from 1985 to 2000 when I worked actively on it. It slowly 
fell behind after that as I was spending my time on the D front end.

This is not evidence that the code quality of the back end is poor.


> Well this is part of the problem: because the code style is old and
> unfamiliar to most contemporary programmers, you're not going to find
> many people who would be able to contribute a PR. And those who can may
> not necessarily be willing to spend the time to do so.  Chicken and egg
> problem.

There are very, very few programmers out there who understand code generation 
issues well enough to improve things. It has nothing to do with the back end 
being old fashioned. The data structures in it are simple and straightforward.

That said, some people have contributed some good work to the back end, but 
nothing fundamental.