Zig vs D generics

[Ola Fosheim Grøstad]

On Wednesday, 12 October 2022 at 12:41:44 UTC, IGotD- wrote:
> Certainly an interesting approach, maybe that's the only thing 
> that is needed. Swift does not have @safe/@trusted/@system for 
> foreign functions, you just call them so maybe Walter was right 
> after all.

It might be the only thing people need for writing regular apps 
with a bit of oomph here and there, but the people that use C for 
signal processing etc are less likely to look at Swift as a 
replacement.

D has some high level features too, but does not evolve in that 
direction? It is evolving in the direction of C, it seems.

> Maybe true but that applies for any platform/library. Just look 
> what happened to Qt. In the case of Swift, yes the 
> Linux/Windows implementations lag behind Apple.

Yes, the Qt case is interesting as it tells us that GPL isn't 
enough when you need a big budget to drive the evolution of a 
library.

So maybe the open source community should find some structural 
way to have many independent parts that interoperate. You 
basically need a set of open source protocol definitions, with 
language support, that people can attach their efforts to rather 
than being a tiny contributor to a gigantic structure.

The current open source community have these monoliths that are 
clogging up the pipelines when they become too large to change 
without a commercial entity behind it.

Some "distributed" innovation is certainly needed.