If you could make any changes to D, what would they look like?

[Paul Backus]

On Friday, 29 October 2021 at 21:16:49 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> Array operations are OK if we view them as intrinsic, opaque 
> operations that the pure abstraction grants us.

My point is that in a systems-level language like D, where the 
side effects of memory allocation are directly observable from 
normal code [1][2], operations that allocate memory are *not* 
opaque, pure abstractions, and cannot possibly be "viewed" as 
such.

I understand that, historically, this kind of argument has 
(successfully) been used to justify things like `pureMalloc` and 
pure array concatenation, but the argument is based on a false 
premise, and always has been.

[1] https://dlang.org/phobos/core_memory.html#.GC.stats
[2] https://dlang.org/phobos/core_memory.html#.GC.query