Is AliasAssign Now Official?

[Bruce Carneal]

On Thursday, 19 August 2021 at 15:36:00 UTC, Paul Backus wrote:
> On Thursday, 19 August 2021 at 15:24:04 UTC, Basile B. wrote:
>>
>> okay. But would AliasAssign have ever been proposed if the 
>> topic of type functions was not there ?
>
> Possibly. The question that lead to type functions being 
> proposed in the first place was "what can we do about the 
> overhead of recursive templates?" Several possible answers were 
> proposed, including type functions, full AST macros, 
> enhancements to CTFE, and AliasAssign.

As noted, long compile times were a big motivator.  Even more 
important, for some, was the need for a more 
readable/maintainable meta programming capability.  Something 
that helped steer common usage back towards the "meta programming 
is just programming" ideal and away from the pain of an 
increasingly tortured (ab)use of templates.

Adding a new form, like core.reflect for example, undeniably 
makes the language broader but it can also make the language 
easier to use in practice: less error prone, more familiar, more 
debuggable, ...

We'll not drop templates but with thoughtful language addition(s) 
their best-practice use can evolve towards an 
easier-to-understand and faster-to-compile subset.