Generality creep

[Nicholas Wilson]

On Thursday, 4 April 2019 at 02:05:15 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu 
wrote:
> On 3/31/19 6:25 PM, Manu wrote:
>> Sure. But in the meantime, fix the objective bug with the 
>> current
>> semantics where you can read/write un-protected data freely. 
>> Right
>> now. Please for the love of god
>
> This does not work as a two stages process, though the "stop 
> the bleeding first then come with the new solution" metaphor 
> seems attractive. The main issues being when we break code that 
> people got to work, we need to offer the alternative as well. 
> Another being that the exact kind of things we disable/enable 
> may be dependent on the ultimate solution.

Well whatever happens I'll be gobsmacked if its not behind an opt 
in switch.
With that in mind, if Manu gets use out of the stopgap of 
disabling read/write access, then I think we should implement 
that ASAP and then listen to whatever he complains about next ;)

> This would be a large effort requiring a strong team. Walter, 
> yourself, and I would be helpful participants but I think 
> between the three of us we don't have the theoretical chops to 
> pull this off. At least I know I don't. We need the likes of 
> Timon Gehr, Johan Engelen, and David Nadlinger (whom I cc'd 
> just in case).

I don't think we are going to be able to do this without 
iterating on the design and closing holes and nuisances that we 
discover. I'm not saying that it is a bad idea to design up front 
as much as we can, but we shouldn't wast time getting hung up on 
design when implementation can give gains to users and guidance 
to the design.