Creeping Bloat in Phobos

[Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d]

On 9/27/14, 4:31 PM, H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 27, 2014 at 11:00:16PM +0000, bearophile via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> H. S. Teoh:
>>
>>> If we can get Andrei on board, I'm all for killing off autodecoding.
>>
>> Killing auto-decoding for std.algorithm functions will break most of
>> my D2 code... perhaps we can do that in a D3 language.
> [...]
>
> Well, obviously it's not going to be done in a careless, drastic way!

Stuff that's missing:

* Reasonable effort to improve performance of auto-decoding;

* A study of the matter revealing either new artifacts and idioms, or 
the insufficiency of such;

* An assessment of the impact on compilability of existing code

* An assessment of the impact on correctness of existing code (that 
compiles and runs in both cases)

* An assessment of the improvement in speed of eliminating auto-decoding

I think there's a very strong need for this stuff, because claims that 
current alternatives to selectively avoid auto-decoding use the throwing 
of hands (and occasional chairs out windows) without any real 
investigation into how library artifacts may help. This approach to 
justifying risky moves is frustratingly unprincipled.

Also I submit that diverting into this is a huge distraction at probably 
the worst moment in the history of the D programming language.

C++ and GC. C++ and GC...



Andrei