all OS functions should be "nothrow @trusted @nogc"

[Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d]

On 7/25/2017 6:09 PM, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
> Likewise, because D depends on hardware flagging of dereferencing null as a 
> segfault, any platforms that *don't* have that for C also won't have it for D. 
> And then @safe doesn't even work in D code either.

I spent 10 years programming on DOS with zero memory protection, and people have 
forgotten how awful that was. You couldn't simply instrument the code with null 
pointer checks, either, because then the program would be too big to fit.

The solution finally appeared with the 286 DOS Extenders, which ran in protected 
mode. I switched to doing all my development under them, and would port to DOS 
only after passing all the test suite.

D is definitely predicated on having hardware memory protection.

The C/C++ Standards are still hanging on to EBCDIC, 10 bit bytes, non-IEEE 
floating point, etc. It's time to let that crap go :-)

One C++ programmer told me that C++ could handle any character set. I asked him 
how RADIX50 was supported. Segfault! (I learned to program on RADIX50 systems.)

D made some fundamental decisions:

* Unicode
* 2's complement
* 8 bit bytes
* IEEE arithmetic
* memory protection
* fixed sizes for integral types
* single pointer type
* >= 32 bit processors

that relegated a lot of junk to the dustbin of history. (It's awful pretending 
to support that stuff. C and C++ pretend do, but just about zero programs will 
actually work on such systems, because there aren't any to try the code out on.)