std.serialization: pre-voting review / discussion

[Dicebot]

On Friday, 23 August 2013 at 13:34:04 UTC, ilya-stromberg wrote:
> It's a serious issue. May be it's more important than range 
> support. For example, I have to change class (bug fixing, new 
> features, etc.), but it comparable with previos version 
> (example: it's always possible to convert "int" to "long"). I 
> that case I can't use std.serialization and have to write own 
> solution (for examle, save data in csv file).

I don't think it as an issue at all. Behavior you want can't be 
defined in a generic way, at least not without lot of UDA help or 
similar declarative approach. In other words, the fact that those 
two classes are interchangeable in the context of the 
serialization exists only in the mind of programmer, not in D 
type system.

More than that, such behavior goes seriously out of the line of D 
being strongly typed language. I think functionality you want 
does belong to a more specialized module, not generic 
std.serialization - maybe even format-specific.