Clojure and Pull Request Controversy

[H. S. Teoh]

On Thu, Nov 29, 2018 at 01:21:50PM -0700, Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Thursday, November 29, 2018 12:54:34 PM MST 12345swordy via Digitalmars-d 
> wrote:
> > On Thursday, 29 November 2018 at 18:40:13 UTC, Adam D. Ruppe
[...]
> > > autodecode is not a language feature. It is a library function
> > > that is only called by other library functions.
> >
> > Yet everyone here acts like it is a major deprecation, with
> > different opinions on how to handle it.
> 
> It _is_ major. What Nicholas has proposed would break almost all
> string-related code in the entire D ecosystem. It would not be silent
> breakage, and because it involves deprecations, no one would have to
> update their code immediately, but a _ton_ of code would have to be
> updated - even code that would work just fine if we were to just
> switch to treating strings as ranges of code units.

Y'know, we keep talking about how huge a breakage removing autodecoding
would cause, but have we ever quantified our claim/belief?  What about
this little experiment:

Since we already have CI setup to test a good number of major D
codebases, how about we create a test environment (could be as simple as
just a PR -- mark it "do not merge" or whatever) that removes
autodecoding.  Let the CI run, and tell us just how big the actual
breakage is.  Presumably, "good" D codebases also ought to have
sufficient unittests that any subtle breakage caused by strings being
ranges of char rather than dchar would be caught as a unittest failure
rather than silently ignored.

Now, of course, the D code tested by CI is only a subset of all D code
out there, but surely it should be a sufficiently generic representation
of your average D code in the wild.  We could add the projects on
code.dlang.org to the list, plus any other projects the forumites here
might be interested to add to this experiment.  This should give us a
pretty good idea of just how big of a breakage we're talking about, and
what kind of issues we might face were we to actually go ahead with
removing autodecoding.

Once we have this data, perhaps it would help us get off the fence about
autodecoding.  It's entirely possible that the actual breakage that
would be caused will actually be much less than we fear.  This
experiment will help allay those unfounded fears -- or confirm them, if
the scope of breakage really is as large as everyone keeps saying.


T

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