It is the year 2020: why should I use / learn D?

[Jon Degenhardt]

On Saturday, 24 November 2018 at 16:26:43 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 24, 2018 at 10:25:23AM -0500, Steven Schveighoffer 
> via Digitalmars-d wrote:
>> 4. The longer we wait, the worse it will be.
>> 
>> There is no way to fix autodecoding without breaking code. So 
>> we have to make that sacrifice to make progress. The most 
>> painful thing I think would be a possible deprecation path 
>> where you have to be explicit about how you want things 
>> decoded in order to avoid messages.
> [...]
>
> This isn't actually as bad as it sounds. Just make strings 
> non-ranges (temporarily), and require .byCodePoint or 
> .byCodeUnit for iteration. Then once the deprecation cycle is 
> over and autodecoding is no more, allow strings as ranges 
> again. It will be painful, yes, but painful is better than 
> silent subtle breakage that nobody knows until it explodes in 
> the customer's face.

I'm also on the side of depreciating of autodecoding. It's a 
significant deficit for systems doing high performance string 
manipulation. This is unfortunate, as otherwise D has many nice 
facilities for these applications. I'd be happy to provide 
additional feedback on this topic, as this an application area 
where I have experience.

--Jon