Creeping Bloat in Phobos

[bearophile via Digitalmars-d]

Walter Bright:

> I'm painfully aware of what a large change removing 
> autodecoding is. That means it'll take a long time to do it. In 
> the meantime, we can stop adding new code to Phobos that does 
> autodecoding. We have taken the first step by adding the 
> .byDchar and .byCodeUnit adapters.

We have .representation and .assumeUTF, I am using it to avoid 
most autodecoding problems. Have you tried to use them in your D 
code?

The changes you propose seem able to break almost every D program 
I have written (most or all code that uses strings with Phobos 
ranges/algorithms, and I use them everywhere). Compared to this 
change, disallowing comma operator to implement nice built-in 
tuples will cause nearly no breakage in my code (I have done a 
small analysis of the damages caused by disallowing the tuple 
operator in my code). It sounds like a change fit for a D3 
language, even more than the introduction of reference counting. 
I think this change will cause some people to permanently stop 
using D.

In the end you are the designer and the benevolent dictator of D, 
I am not qualified to refuse or oppose such changes. But before 
doing this change I suggest to study how many changes it causes 
in an average small D program that uses strings and 
ranges/algorithms.

Bye,
bearophile