D Language Foundation Monthly Meeting Summary for December 2022

[Siarhei Siamashka]

On Saturday, 21 January 2023 at 04:29:28 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
> Robert thinks Rust has won that game. We're the second person 
> to the moon.

Do you mean second to last? The safety offered by D language 
currently only looks good when compared to C/C++, but is worse 
than pretty much any of the other popular/mainstream languages. D 
language even did not invent memory safety, because the other 
safe languages existed long before it (such as Python, etc.).

The strong point of D language is a convenient syntax combined 
with full native speed of compiled binaries. And also compilation 
speed for those who care about it. But the safety is not exactly 
great. And compatibility breaking habits are also bad. D can't 
realistically compete with Rust on the safety front and with 
C/C++ on the compatibility front.

> Put `@safe` on top, disallow taking addresses of the stack, 
> don't allow returning `ref`, and don't allow pointer 
> arithmetic. That's as safe as we need to be.

I like this proposal. Will it actually happen?