Does D have too many features?

[bearophile]

Walter:

> The first thing to emphasize is that NONE of this will happen 
> for D2. The emphasis on D2 is fixing implementation and 
> toolchain issues. Breaking existing code is off the table 
> unless we are pretty much forced to in order to fix some other 
> more important issue.

But you need to keep into account that D2 is still a not widely 
used language. So deprecating some things now will cause far less 
troubles than doing it in D3 some years from now. So I suggest to 
be a bit more flexible on this.


> We've had some success in deprecating mistaken features - the 
> bit data type, and typedefs.

In the end I agree that deprecating typedef was the right thing. 
Not because it's useless, quite the contrary, but because it was 
not well designed, so it's better to remove it to have a chance 
later to get it more right. Adding if far simpler than removing. 
But keep in mind that Phobos Typedef is so broken that it's 
essentially not usable in practical situations (quite more broken 
even than emplace and rebindable, that have several problems). So 
we don't have a replacement yet.

Bye,
bearophile