Phobos' slow descent into madness

[Per Nordlöw]

On Friday, 7 May 2021 at 20:47:57 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> What the heck is that? Turns out it's a private symbol (that 
> for some reason turns out to be duplicated in druntime and 
> phobos). That private symbol, in turn, is used in a suite of 
> desperate templates of which drabness is only overcome by their 
> mind-numbing repetitiveness:
>
> BooleanTypeOf
> IntegralTypeOf
> FloatingPointTypeOf
> CharTypeOf
> StaticArrayTypeOf
> DynamicArrayTypeOf
> AssocArrayTypeOf
>
> What are these used for? Glad you asked! All these support 
> "alias this" for the std.format.format function.

It's worth mentioning that, according to `git blame`, these 
symbols were all added by k-hara in 2012 and haven't changed in 
any fundamental way since. So I don't think the title of this 
thread quite represents the recent slow decline of things in 
phobos. Rather the decline happended abruptly 10 years ago. A 
more relevant question to ask ourselves is who approved these 
changes in 2012.