DIP 1028---Make @safe the Default---Community Review Round 1

[IGotD-]

On Saturday, 4 January 2020 at 16:16:30 UTC, Arine wrote:
> On Friday, 3 January 2020 at 22:59:53 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
>>> This is going to be a big breaking change, and if you are 
>>> going to do the same thing with `nothrow`, that's way too 
>>> much breakage for very little benefit just to follow a trend.
>>
>> There are compelling reasons for nothrow by default. I suggest 
>> deferring this discussion until the DIP is put forward for 
>> review.
>
> An expression comes to mind, "death by a thousand cuts". If you 
> are only going to look at each DIP on it's own, without also 
> taking into consideration other DIPs, then you aren't going to 
> realize just how much breakage the accumulation of all the DIPs 
> is actually causing. There's been a lot of DIPs that cause a 
> bunch of breaking changes recently. They are all small, but 
> it's all starting to add up. And the breakage is starting to 
> outweigh the benefits that they bring. To me personally for my 
> projects, they don't really bring any benefit, but they still 
> break my code.

We need to have a separate discussion about the strategy for 
breaking changes. We might even agree with the change but the 
change has an impact on the current codebase that wants to us to 
disagree with the change.

Walter have hinted several ideas about changing the D syntax, 
several of the that I agree with but just changing the current 
compiler causes problems. In the pipeline are changes like 
"nothrow" by default, "final" by default which is like to see but 
perhaps it is time to start working on D3 and leave the current 
compiler in maintenance mode. By doing this we can speed up the 
development of the "new D" instead of being held back by 
compatibility worries.