DIP 1021--Argument Ownership and Function Calls--Formal Assessment

[Exil]

On Wednesday, 23 October 2019 at 16:54:36 UTC, 12345swordy wrote:
> "“But D has a GC!”, I hear you exclaim.

No body said that. Funny how you chose the simplest argument to 
argue against.

> Yes, but it’s also a
> systems programming language with value types and pointers, 
> meaning that today, D isn’t memory safe. DIP1000 was a step in 
> the right direction, but we have to be memory safe unless 
> programmers opt-out via a “I know what I’m doing” @trusted 
> block or function. This includes transitioning to @safe by 
> default."
>
> https://dlang.org/blog/2019/10/15/my-vision-of-ds-future/
>
> -Alex

Despite the mess DIP1000 was and still is, it did actually solve 
some problems. Even still there are bugs related to DIP1000 that 
aren't being fixed anymore cause the focus has already shifted 
away from it. The DIP1000 still says it will be "updated" but 
that's most likely never going to happen. Especially considering 
this DIP1021 has an example of a bug that the DIP doesn't even 
fix.

For @safe, it is already safe if you use the GC. If you use @safe 
with DIP1021 you are restricting the user in what code they can 
write and it doesn't make their code any safer. This is just a 
flat restriction for no purpose for them.

For manual memory management, this does not solve the problem 
illustrated by the DIP's example. Especially considering that in 
a blog post (formally unbeknownst to the DIP1021) the intention 
is to introduce a @live attribute. And the actual problem won't 
actually be fixed unless the @live attribute is there.

So it doesn't benefit @safe users, it doesn't benefit manual 
memory management users and it won't come to fruition until some 
future attribute is implemented. I'm all for implementing Rust's 
memory management in D, but this is just horrible project 
management in all regards. Maybe it wouldn't be that big of a 
deal if it was a smaller project where you can muddle through 
finding your way willy nilly, but the whole purpose of the 
formalities -is- should be so you don't do that.