if(arr) now a warning

[Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d]

On 5/1/2015 2:28 AM, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
> I was in the "break my code" camp for a long time, but this has gradually
> changed as the amount of D code I've written grew. Let me tell you, it's totally
> not fun when you need to quickly fix a D program you wrote 3 years ago because
> something is on fire and it needs fixing now, and discover you have to make a
> bunch of changes just to get it to compile again. The alternative is using an
> older compiler, and DVM helps with that - but this doesn't work if the fix is in
> a library which is not compatible with older compiler versions.

I've had the mispleasure several times of reaching back to update some older D 
code of mine, that works fine, and finding not only will it not compile, I have 
to re-architect parts of it.

The situation was so bad I wound up creating:

     https://github.com/DigitalMars/undeaD

and if *I* find this annoying, irritating, disheartening, etc., I can only 
imagine how others feel about it.

Sometimes the older code is complex, underdocumented, and I don't remember how 
it worked or how it needs to be re-architected. But it does work, it just 
doesn't compile anymore.

Imagine you find some cool D library, download it, and find it doesn't compile. 
How many of you are going to fix it? Or are you just going to chuck it to /dev/null?

How many users have we lost because of this?

This really blows. And things like that isnan => isNaN really has GOT TO STOP. 
Just today I found it broke some older piece of code I had that's perfectly correct.

We need to be working on things that MATTER. What happens with every Reddit post 
about D? No matter the topic, it always becomes about D not being usable without 
the GC.

A big piece of the fix for that is going through Phobos and fixing code that 
returns gc allocated arrays with algorithms that return ranges.

Why am I the only one working on that? I don't remember anyone having a problem 
with isnan.

I'm willing to break existing code for a large benefit. Not a small one. And 
certainly not when the benefit is zero, like the isnan renaming. And I'm willing 
to break code that relied on bugs in the compiler.