What's the current state of D?

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Nick Sabalausky" <a at a.a> wrote in message 
news:gu51vu$1e2f$1 at digitalmars.com...
> "mpt" <mpt at ikikiki.fi> wrote in message 
> news:gu4unq$16e2$1 at digitalmars.com...
>>I keep making 2 mistakes in my D programs, and fixing them feels
>> troublesome.
>>
>> 1. Null references. I get a segfault and gdb is useless (ldc thing 
>> maybe).
>> 2. Exceptions. It prints the msg nicely, but it's unhelpful in tracing
>> the real cause of error.
>>
>> Shouldn't there be an automatic null check for references and stack
>> traces? Sometimes I think I'm using the wrong tool as others have
>> solutions for these.
>
> These are two very common complaints, and there has been a lot of 
> disussion about both. Hopefully they'll get taken care of.
>

To elaborate:

Pretty much everyone agrees we need stack traces on exceptions. I'm actually 
kind of surprised DMD still doesn't have them, I wouldn't think it would be 
a real major change (at least compared to some other things). IIRC, I think 
the Linux LDC already has this feature.

About the null references, most people seem to agree that the right way to 
fix that is with some sort of "non-nullable". But there's a lot of 
disagreement on exactly how non-nullables should work.